‘Riding with the Silver Wolf’ is a poetry collection that resists the dominant mood of contemporary verse. Where much recent poetry is loud, confessional, and engineered for instant effect, Bindiya Bedi Charan Noronha opts for slowness. Her poems pause, observe, and reflect. This is both the book's central strength and its most persistent limitation.
The method is laid out early in ‘The Pause’, where the speaker asks, “Are you free to be yourself? / Who are you?” and then deliberately puts the pen down, becoming “the vessel, ready to receive.” The gesture feels less like a poetic flourish than an aesthetic manifesto. Noronha privileges listening over assertion, restraint over display. Technically, this results in spare free verse, short lines, and plain diction, with split rhymes used to slow rather than propel the reader forward.
This restraint works best when the poems engage directly with social reality.
‘Monsoon’, written in the shadow of the pandemic, avoids the familiar language of resilience and recovery. Instead, it confronts the erasure of collective grief, asking whether we can really forget “the multitudes / swept away by that wave of sickness.” The poem’s imagery—a storm, a battered rose, may be familiar, but its emotional discipline prevents sentimentality.
The collection’s most compelling moments come when lyric observation intersects with political clarity. ‘Varanasi’ is among the strongest poems here, exposing how faith, patriarchy, and poverty converge to entrap widows in ritualised abandonment. Noronha refuses both pity and romanticism; dignity is shown as fragile, provisional, and sustained through endurance rather than transcendence. Similarly, ‘Stampede’ offers a sharp critique of religious spectacle, indicating not only crowd frenzy but the godmen who vanish once death and injury remain.
Historical and ecological consciousness deepen the book’s ethical scope. In ‘Histories of Bygone Times’, monuments are stripped of their grandeur and returned to the anonymous labourers who built them. Later ecological poems adopt a more overtly polemical tone, warning that the Earth can meet human needs but not endless greed, culminating in a bleak evolutionary logic where “only the cactus will survive the apocalypse.” These poems are blunt, sometimes didactic, but effective in their refusal to soften the message.
Where the book falters is in its lyrical passages that rely too heavily on inherited imagery. Poems like ‘Water Speaks’, rich with abundance, harmony, and natural music, feel less discovered than received. The language here is pleasant but predictable, and the absence of formal experimentation limits emotional surprise. Editorial issues—uneven lineation, typographical slips, and conservative structural choices—also interrupt the reading experience. Even the accompanying photographs, while grounding the poems in reality, tend to illustrate rather than challenge the text.
Noronha, a poet and linguist, brings ethical seriousness and social awareness to her work. What she avoids—sonic play, formal risk, aesthetic provocation—will frustrate readers seeking innovation. Yet her commitment to moral attention, to looking steadily rather than dramatically, gives the collection its quiet authority.
Title: Riding with the Silver Wolf
Author: Bindiya Bedi Charan Noronha
Pages: 94
Language: English
Publisher: Red River Press
Price: ₹ 349/-
