Book Review: A Week with Enya by Amar B. Singh

A Week with Enya by Amar B. Singh is a delicate collection of poems concerning the voice of a father and a life explorer. The collection offers over 20 poems, mostly written in simple, lucid, and prosaic form. Each poem is a gem in the collection and makes us cogitate about us being human and our existence.

Through contemporary poems, it has become a saga profound to challenge the perceptions that gripped our beliefs and allied existence. This collection is quite modern in its semblance, as we run through the poems and prose, we find the voice of the poet shuttling between his desires and his life at working ambiences. There is everything that it’s being a modern poetry collection, for instance, in the poem ‘The Pursuit of Intelligence’ the poet mocks the smart people for lusting after smart technologies like AI, ML, etc., but the same smart people are unable to communicate with an innocent, subtly autistic, child. Isn’t ironical?

The way Amar Singh weaves the voice and overall backdrop for each poem, a sense of constant awareness of an inner life emerges that looks like stronger and more tangible than the unplumbed hedonistic external world. A reader at leisure is likely to experience a gamut of experiences in the collection such as love, compassion, passion, greed, betrayal, fear, and so on. Poems are written in rhythmic expression but warmth of realism and pragmatism is always around the horizon.

As the title suggests, A Week with Enya, the poet has drawn inspiration for all the poems from his autistic daughter with whom he spent one week. It is to be noted that how much children have the profundity to change our perceptions when we are snow blind in some sort of rat race. Nearly all poems take us close to the societal patterns which subsequently change and affect our lives. Are the societal values correctly etched in our dogmatism and mind and grooming? The collection asks vociferously and most of the poems like Identity, The Lion in the Cage, Fasting, The Deep Lake are based on similar proposition.

It’s a good collection which can be read over and again to seek an asylum from the scorching reality of the world and it will, for sure, sooth the mind for some good extent. A bit dark, largely moving, and cogitating – this book needs to be savoured by people in seek of good contemporary poetry collection.