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Clear Brightness
Selected by The Straits Times as one of the best books of 2012.
In poems that shuttle between Singapore and Australia, award-winning poet Boey Kim Cheng seeks to establish a new sense of self and home on the shifting ground between memory and imagination. A noodle-maker in Melbourne triggers connective threads to the poet’s birthplace. A train crossing over the Johor-Singapore Causeway evokes the dislocating experience of interstitial existence. After six long years, one of Singapore’s greatest modern voices returns with a work of profound insight and erudition.
Praise:
"Boey Kim Cheng perseveres in drawing poignant bridges between a vanishing past and that ever-indifferent future. Each poem marks a destination that has disappeared, or is disappearing, marked by a sense of both public and intensely personal loss, accumulating in what the poet has himself described as a growing ‘list of the disappeared’—full of heartfelt inventory, difficult reconciliations and a thoughtful compassion. Clear Brightness is Boey's best collection yet."
—Cyril Wong, author of The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza and Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me and Other Stories
“The poems in Clear Brightness continue the story of the writer’s life in Australia while harking back to the rhythms of his birthplace. The result is verses juxtaposing contrasts such as the Qing Ming grave-cleaning ritual with the menace of a bush fire. Haunting and mesmerising.”
—Akshita Nanda, The Straits Times
“There is a mellowness to the writing, a new sensuality to sense memories invoked with vivid clarity, and, dare I say it, even clear notes of happiness. The deft interplay of images, drawn from tapestry and music, are a swoonsome delight to read.”
—Ong Sor Fern, The Sunday Times
“No other writer from Singapore influences the country’s current batch of poets more than Australia’s new citizen Boey Kim Cheng.”
—Gwee Li Sui, author and illustrator of Myth of the Stone
“Boey Kim Cheng’s poems gather as they go powerful rhythmical force precisely by being rooted in the specifics of experience and feeling. They are deeply moving for their grand (and sometimes sorrow-shot) amplitude, as they take in the plurality of this breathtaking world.”
—Judith Beveridge, winner of the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal
“The best post-1965 English-language poet in the republic today.”
—Shirley Geok-lin Lim, author of Among the White Moon Faces
“There is no denying the power of his poetry, a poetry so often, one feels, energised by its need to break through.”
—Anne Lee Tzu Pheng, Cultural Medallion recipient for Literature
“Boey’s words freeze moments across cities, and landscapes of the mind wedged in different slices of time. The longtime reader will find that the sojourning impulse through his earlier poems now settle into a less restless beat, and the anxious search for home gives way to an acceptance of multiple ones.”
—Wei Fen Lee, co-editor of Ceriph and Coast
In poems that shuttle between Singapore and Australia, award-winning poet Boey Kim Cheng seeks to establish a new sense of self and home on the shifting ground between memory and imagination. A noodle-maker in Melbourne triggers connective threads to the poet’s birthplace. A train crossing over the Johor-Singapore Causeway evokes the dislocating experience of interstitial existence. After six long years, one of Singapore’s greatest modern voices returns with a work of profound insight and erudition.
Praise:
"Boey Kim Cheng perseveres in drawing poignant bridges between a vanishing past and that ever-indifferent future. Each poem marks a destination that has disappeared, or is disappearing, marked by a sense of both public and intensely personal loss, accumulating in what the poet has himself described as a growing ‘list of the disappeared’—full of heartfelt inventory, difficult reconciliations and a thoughtful compassion. Clear Brightness is Boey's best collection yet."
—Cyril Wong, author of The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza and Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me and Other Stories
“The poems in Clear Brightness continue the story of the writer’s life in Australia while harking back to the rhythms of his birthplace. The result is verses juxtaposing contrasts such as the Qing Ming grave-cleaning ritual with the menace of a bush fire. Haunting and mesmerising.”
—Akshita Nanda, The Straits Times
“There is a mellowness to the writing, a new sensuality to sense memories invoked with vivid clarity, and, dare I say it, even clear notes of happiness. The deft interplay of images, drawn from tapestry and music, are a swoonsome delight to read.”
—Ong Sor Fern, The Sunday Times
“No other writer from Singapore influences the country’s current batch of poets more than Australia’s new citizen Boey Kim Cheng.”
—Gwee Li Sui, author and illustrator of Myth of the Stone
“Boey Kim Cheng’s poems gather as they go powerful rhythmical force precisely by being rooted in the specifics of experience and feeling. They are deeply moving for their grand (and sometimes sorrow-shot) amplitude, as they take in the plurality of this breathtaking world.”
—Judith Beveridge, winner of the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal
“The best post-1965 English-language poet in the republic today.”
—Shirley Geok-lin Lim, author of Among the White Moon Faces
“There is no denying the power of his poetry, a poetry so often, one feels, energised by its need to break through.”
—Anne Lee Tzu Pheng, Cultural Medallion recipient for Literature
“Boey’s words freeze moments across cities, and landscapes of the mind wedged in different slices of time. The longtime reader will find that the sojourning impulse through his earlier poems now settle into a less restless beat, and the anxious search for home gives way to an acceptance of multiple ones.”
—Wei Fen Lee, co-editor of Ceriph and Coast
- GenresPoetry
64 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2012
1 person is currently reading
57 people want to read
About the author
Boey Kim Cheng
27 books21 followersBoey Kim Cheng is a multi-award winning Singapore-born poet, and a 1996 recipient of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award. He emigrated to Australia in 1997, but returned in 2013 as one of Nanyang Technological University's writers-in-residence; he is currently Associate Professor in the NTU Division of English. He has published five collections of poetry, including Clear Brightness, which was selected by The Straits Times as one of the Best Books of 2012. His writing is frequently studied in tertiary and university institutions in Singapore and abroad.
Boey co-founded Mascara Literary Review in 2007, the first Australian literary journal to promote Asian Australian writing, and in 2013 co-edited the groundbreaking anthology Contemporary Asian Australian Poets. In 2017, Epigram Books reissued his celebrated travel memoir Between Stations, and released his first novel, Gull Between Heaven and Earth, on the life of the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu.
Boey co-founded Mascara Literary Review in 2007, the first Australian literary journal to promote Asian Australian writing, and in 2013 co-edited the groundbreaking anthology Contemporary Asian Australian Poets. In 2017, Epigram Books reissued his celebrated travel memoir Between Stations, and released his first novel, Gull Between Heaven and Earth, on the life of the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
October 29, 2012
Reading "Clear Brightness", one gets the sense of being led by the hand through endless alleyways of personal memories - it is an act of shadowing Boey Kim Cheng as he follows his father into the past and his son into the future. Boey's words freeze moments across cities, and landscapes of the mind wedged in different slices of time. The longtime reader of Boey will find that the sojourning impulse through his earlier poems now settle into a less restless beat, and the anxious search for 'home' gives way to an acceptance of multiple ones. These lines from "Chinatowns" are emblematic of this sentiment: "...and in between/ discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns/ grew out of not knowing whether to return or to stay, and then became home". The book is full of gems like these - lines that reflect writing as reconciliatory, that settle comfortably into the liminal, that draw a reader in so intimately that it is difficult to leave after. The only question that remains then, even as it is declared firmly in the last poem that there will be "No more leaving after this leaving", is, where will the next journey be meandering into, and what form will it take?
April 26, 2013
Don't get me wrong, this collection is brilliant, but the overdose of nostalgia and the poetry of memory is starting to wear thin for this reader. "No more leaving after this leaving," and if Boey began with that, what wonders we could have seen!
January 17, 2019
“The Ghost Freight of Memory” A review of Kim Cheng Boey’s Clear Brightness:
Cheng Boey’s poems are like letters posted through the fracture lines that separate past and present, multiple identities and diverse homelands. Real letters. The kind he evokes so deftly in “Poste Restante” — hand written; hand franked; “memories penned on onionskin”. The kind of letters that conjure an almost forgotten era of travel. The poems are heavy with the humidity of loss, both personal and cultural. Yet they are never sentimental, nor mired in nostalgia for its own sake.
The title poem that opens the collection, for instance, is a complex weaving of utterly different cultures, settings and times. The ashy aftermath of a bushfire — an experience that is frequently deemed to be quintessentially Australian — evokes for the poet a whole other world, one that has been irrevocably lost. The Chinese cultural heritage of Qing Ming (Clear Brightness) when the tombs of the ancestors were swept, food supplied and ‘money’ and incense burned for their proper care has not just been relegated to the continuous present in another country. Rather it has been doubly ruptured from memory with the news that the relentless forces of urbanisation that plague the poet’s original home of Singapore have relegated to oblivion the tombs and the honouring ceremonies he experienced in childhood. The poem also evokes other religions also, with the word ‘penitents’ and ‘shriven’ and the direct acknowledgement of Catholicism:
Packed into this one relatively short poem is a recapitulation of all the complex losses and unique cultural refractions through which any non-indigenous Australian experiences this place. So the ‘quintessentially Australian’ experience powders like the ash itself into motes and fragments. (The ashes of an Australian bushfire might bring forth very different memories for the Jewish refugees who came here post World War Two.)
Cheng Boey, of course, is the émigré who has direct experience of two homelands and being a poet is able to encompass this complexity. The poem stretches back across time to unknown ancestors, but also reaches forward to an unknown future. In many other poems in the collection we see the poet as a child. His father and his grandmother are significant presences, also as seen through the eyes of a child (his mother seems largely absent). In “Clear Brightness” we catch echoes of the next generation laying down memory traces inextricably woven with the new country:
Cheng Boey’s own father gambled and often lost, ending up a bankrupt. The poet himself also gambles in the lottery of life but with a different currency. Several of the poems evoke the chances taken by young travellers and backpackers who set out on all the roads of the world. Cheng Boey never returns permanently to his original home — for many Singaporeans such a return is impossible anyway because the rate of change is so rapid that home is irredeemably altered every time they leave. He does, however, return to himself with a backpack full of memories to be distilled into poems — “Lost Time” is a particular favourite for me. It is visual in a painterly manner. The lingua francas of travellers and writers blend here for a transcendent moment:
The skills of the seasoned traveller are clearly a boon to someone who becomes a migrant and thus has to navigate and integrate a permanent state of cultural dislocation. In Cheng Boey’s work these skills and impulses are manifest in the two sets of series of poems in the collection. The first is fifteen idiosyncratic sonnets addressed “To Markets” in which the poet evokes a range of markets from widely different locations. It can be a difficult move to collect poems around a single topic in this way. There is a danger of unevenness in how successfully poems are as individual works, when they are subsumed into the larger whole. This series does work, though, despite a small degree of this inevitable unevenness, and each individual poem earns a place in the series on its own merits as well as its shared topic.
The “Chinatown” series also contains fifteen poems, in this case of eight lines each. The particular meanings of each of these self-contained octaves are refracted through the coda of a sixteenth eight-line poem, entitled “Chinatowns”. For the reader, like myself, who reads the poems sequentially, there is a delight in discovering this coda.
This final poem enriches and clarifies the whole and makes one want to begin again immediately from the beginning of the series.
Travel and family are pre-eminent in the themes of these poems, but it’s worth noting the presence of two others that are constant points of reference: food (“Soup” is a delicious poem in homage to the poet’s beloved Grandmother); and music (“Take Five on the F3 essays a jazzy improvisation that fits its theme). “Marking Time” does not seem to resonate with any of these, connected only through the notion of what it is to actually achieve the writing of a poem. Having spent many years marking University assignments, part of me is empathetic with this poem’s account of both the tedium and the occasional delight when a student’s work suddenly takes flight. However, I do demur at his being so completely dismissive of the riches possible in genre writing. This is not a reflection on the poem itself, of course, merely a very minor quibble, a difference of opinion. Not something that diminishes the pleasure I’ve received from reading both the individual poems and the entirety of this collection.
Cheng Boey, himself, in the interview that forms an epilogue to the poems, distances his work from straightforward autobiography (autobiography is never straightforward he admits). He does, however, “see each collection as marking out a stage or phase in my life”. The anaphora of the closing poem “No More” is a sonorous litany of loss until the humble triumph of the closing line. It’s simple enough “No more leaving after this leaving”, yet it emerges from the twisting alleys of memory with a “clear brightness” of its own, despite the undoubted allusion to death. The line works to bring poetic closure to both the poem and the entire collection. It left me feeling keen to embark on new terrain with this poet in future collections.
Kim Cheng Boey is a preeminent member of the diaspora of Singaporean poets. Now resident in Australia, he teaches at the University of Newcastle. Clear Brightness was published by Puncher and Wattman Poetry in 2012.
Cheng Boey’s poems are like letters posted through the fracture lines that separate past and present, multiple identities and diverse homelands. Real letters. The kind he evokes so deftly in “Poste Restante” — hand written; hand franked; “memories penned on onionskin”. The kind of letters that conjure an almost forgotten era of travel. The poems are heavy with the humidity of loss, both personal and cultural. Yet they are never sentimental, nor mired in nostalgia for its own sake.
The title poem that opens the collection, for instance, is a complex weaving of utterly different cultures, settings and times. The ashy aftermath of a bushfire — an experience that is frequently deemed to be quintessentially Australian — evokes for the poet a whole other world, one that has been irrevocably lost. The Chinese cultural heritage of Qing Ming (Clear Brightness) when the tombs of the ancestors were swept, food supplied and ‘money’ and incense burned for their proper care has not just been relegated to the continuous present in another country. Rather it has been doubly ruptured from memory with the news that the relentless forces of urbanisation that plague the poet’s original home of Singapore have relegated to oblivion the tombs and the honouring ceremonies he experienced in childhood. The poem also evokes other religions also, with the word ‘penitents’ and ‘shriven’ and the direct acknowledgement of Catholicism:
No such unrest for Grandma and Dad
who went straight into the fire.
Anyway they turned Catholic
and have no use for paper money
or earthly feasts.
Packed into this one relatively short poem is a recapitulation of all the complex losses and unique cultural refractions through which any non-indigenous Australian experiences this place. So the ‘quintessentially Australian’ experience powders like the ash itself into motes and fragments. (The ashes of an Australian bushfire might bring forth very different memories for the Jewish refugees who came here post World War Two.)
Cheng Boey, of course, is the émigré who has direct experience of two homelands and being a poet is able to encompass this complexity. The poem stretches back across time to unknown ancestors, but also reaches forward to an unknown future. In many other poems in the collection we see the poet as a child. His father and his grandmother are significant presences, also as seen through the eyes of a child (his mother seems largely absent). In “Clear Brightness” we catch echoes of the next generation laying down memory traces inextricably woven with the new country:
as we fled around midnight, my son
bewildered in my arms, his sister bright-eyed,
exclaiming, It’s snowing, Christmas just weeks away
Cheng Boey’s own father gambled and often lost, ending up a bankrupt. The poet himself also gambles in the lottery of life but with a different currency. Several of the poems evoke the chances taken by young travellers and backpackers who set out on all the roads of the world. Cheng Boey never returns permanently to his original home — for many Singaporeans such a return is impossible anyway because the rate of change is so rapid that home is irredeemably altered every time they leave. He does, however, return to himself with a backpack full of memories to be distilled into poems — “Lost Time” is a particular favourite for me. It is visual in a painterly manner. The lingua francas of travellers and writers blend here for a transcendent moment:
. . . and I was looking beyond
into whatever she was tuned into, a place beyond
remembering and forgetting, beyond the children’s
lithe bodies, the fountain, the old men,
the words arriving
in their sweet unhurried time
The skills of the seasoned traveller are clearly a boon to someone who becomes a migrant and thus has to navigate and integrate a permanent state of cultural dislocation. In Cheng Boey’s work these skills and impulses are manifest in the two sets of series of poems in the collection. The first is fifteen idiosyncratic sonnets addressed “To Markets” in which the poet evokes a range of markets from widely different locations. It can be a difficult move to collect poems around a single topic in this way. There is a danger of unevenness in how successfully poems are as individual works, when they are subsumed into the larger whole. This series does work, though, despite a small degree of this inevitable unevenness, and each individual poem earns a place in the series on its own merits as well as its shared topic.
The “Chinatown” series also contains fifteen poems, in this case of eight lines each. The particular meanings of each of these self-contained octaves are refracted through the coda of a sixteenth eight-line poem, entitled “Chinatowns”. For the reader, like myself, who reads the poems sequentially, there is a delight in discovering this coda.
. . . testing ways
return might be possible against these homesick inventions,
trace the traveller’s alien steps across borders, and in between
discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns
grew out of not knowing to return or to stay, and then became home.
This final poem enriches and clarifies the whole and makes one want to begin again immediately from the beginning of the series.
Travel and family are pre-eminent in the themes of these poems, but it’s worth noting the presence of two others that are constant points of reference: food (“Soup” is a delicious poem in homage to the poet’s beloved Grandmother); and music (“Take Five on the F3 essays a jazzy improvisation that fits its theme). “Marking Time” does not seem to resonate with any of these, connected only through the notion of what it is to actually achieve the writing of a poem. Having spent many years marking University assignments, part of me is empathetic with this poem’s account of both the tedium and the occasional delight when a student’s work suddenly takes flight. However, I do demur at his being so completely dismissive of the riches possible in genre writing. This is not a reflection on the poem itself, of course, merely a very minor quibble, a difference of opinion. Not something that diminishes the pleasure I’ve received from reading both the individual poems and the entirety of this collection.
Cheng Boey, himself, in the interview that forms an epilogue to the poems, distances his work from straightforward autobiography (autobiography is never straightforward he admits). He does, however, “see each collection as marking out a stage or phase in my life”. The anaphora of the closing poem “No More” is a sonorous litany of loss until the humble triumph of the closing line. It’s simple enough “No more leaving after this leaving”, yet it emerges from the twisting alleys of memory with a “clear brightness” of its own, despite the undoubted allusion to death. The line works to bring poetic closure to both the poem and the entire collection. It left me feeling keen to embark on new terrain with this poet in future collections.
Kim Cheng Boey is a preeminent member of the diaspora of Singaporean poets. Now resident in Australia, he teaches at the University of Newcastle. Clear Brightness was published by Puncher and Wattman Poetry in 2012.
March 17, 2015
These are poems of an assured mastery, of a voice arriving at itself, even as it speaks of loss. Although Boey has moved to Australia and become an Australian citizen there, he cannot help but speak of Singapore--its loss due to time, urban redevelopment, deaths in the family, and migration. Poems such as "Dinky's House of Russian Goods" and "The National Theatre, Singapore" bring lost places back to the life. Sequences such as "To Markets" and "Chinatowns" are rich with details and associations, recalled in memory. Most impressive, to my mind, is "The Disappearing Suite," which produces from a very particular life a universal music. It touches the depths sounded in Eliot's "The Four Quartets," though without the latter's religious angst. Who said that a poet's task is to make of his or her life a symbol? In "The Disappearing Suite," and more generally in Clear Brightness, Boey has succeeded in doing so.
December 2, 2014
The title poem and the poem 'la mian' are minor classics and really the best writing about Singapore I've read; culturally rich, allusive and clever - some striking and beautiful metaphors that explore the way we regard home. It is also a reminder of the way poetry gives depth and reality to places as they come under its generative scrutiny.
November 8, 2012
There is always a wistfulness, a sense of loss to Boey Kim Cheng's writing but it is tempered here by a sensuality in the sense memories. Beautiful, piercing stuff
May 6, 2017
Qingming is the Chinese festival of sweeping and restoring one's ancestors tombs — a clearing. Boey dissects the Chinese name: qing (清) means clear; ming (明), brightness. And clear brightness can only be found where there is nothing opaque in the way, when all that is left is absence and loss.
While Boey's poems carry a sort of music throughout, where he shines his clear light on becomes less coherent, but his words are no less enjoyable and lose none of their contemplative gravity. Just as Qingming in Singapore involves a heady mix of equatorial sun and ash-like joss, Boey sustains this sense of white, parching light and ashen greyness in the first few pieces, even as he trawls through very different places. This only lasts for the initial third of the book, sadly, and I would have liked to see more.
Still, the underlying themes of absence, forgetting, and loss ring out through the collection; sometimes clearly, sometimes more dampened or muffled. Boey never strays too far from his point: to shed clarity on his experiences, and to remember, expose, and extend the visceral moment of displacement, longing, and nostalgia. In searching through his own memories of various places — markets, Chinatowns, Change Alley, his own home, India and Australia and the Middle East — he uses them to connect back to an old Singapore in passing, inching towards the future.
[Review 1 - 06/05/17.]
While Boey's poems carry a sort of music throughout, where he shines his clear light on becomes less coherent, but his words are no less enjoyable and lose none of their contemplative gravity. Just as Qingming in Singapore involves a heady mix of equatorial sun and ash-like joss, Boey sustains this sense of white, parching light and ashen greyness in the first few pieces, even as he trawls through very different places. This only lasts for the initial third of the book, sadly, and I would have liked to see more.
Still, the underlying themes of absence, forgetting, and loss ring out through the collection; sometimes clearly, sometimes more dampened or muffled. Boey never strays too far from his point: to shed clarity on his experiences, and to remember, expose, and extend the visceral moment of displacement, longing, and nostalgia. In searching through his own memories of various places — markets, Chinatowns, Change Alley, his own home, India and Australia and the Middle East — he uses them to connect back to an old Singapore in passing, inching towards the future.
[Review 1 - 06/05/17.]
April 21, 2016
Enjoyed this collection a lot and read through it very fast as I couldn't put it down. My favourite was 'Soup'. Definitely going to note down my favourite lines from this poem. It was nostalgic and at the same time, reminded me of my own grandmother.
December 9, 2023
mr boey makes interesting associations, such as the ash of his burning house in australia recalling the 清明节s of his childhood. or, watching his grandmother prepare food, the toughness of the chopping board seguing into a line on toughness of the person herself. sometimes, though, the heavy focus on the poet's childhood can come off a bit maudlin. such as later on in the same poem, "Soup":
At the end of his life Carver says it’s all gravy.
For me it will be a bowl of soup, the essence
slow-cooked and distilled from what has eluded
me, what was never said, the forgotten recipes
and untold stories simmered to a broth
of lost time, the ineffable flavours, clarity born
of long brewing, words boiled down
to an essence that restores us, food
we can believe in, right saltiness, right sweetness,
the harmony of five flavours a corrective
to the imbalance around and in us, the warring
elements reconciled in its pacific taste.
as the book goes on, some of the poems kinda blend into each other a little, since many of them deal with similar themes. the futility yet necessity of memory, the in-between-ness of travel, the way the past lives on in the present and the places we have left behind live on in the places where we have arrived...
favourites: The Disappearing Suite, No More
———
... and in between
discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns
grew out of not knowing to return or to stay, and then became home.
- Chinatowns
something is going, slipping through between forgetting
and remembering, the aura draining from the images,
the absence on the edge a vacuum sucking in the colours,
the living features, the strip of light between Rothko's grey
on black panels fading so slow you think it's staying.
- The Disappearing Suite
On his abacus he clicks the beads of profit:
the anonymity, the fresh slate that sometimes
feels like an epitaph, the new start that seems
like an aftermath, the new country an empty
warehouse where the future hasn't arrived, and the past
hasn't docked to unload the wares.
- The Migrant Ledger
At the end of his life Carver says it’s all gravy.
For me it will be a bowl of soup, the essence
slow-cooked and distilled from what has eluded
me, what was never said, the forgotten recipes
and untold stories simmered to a broth
of lost time, the ineffable flavours, clarity born
of long brewing, words boiled down
to an essence that restores us, food
we can believe in, right saltiness, right sweetness,
the harmony of five flavours a corrective
to the imbalance around and in us, the warring
elements reconciled in its pacific taste.
as the book goes on, some of the poems kinda blend into each other a little, since many of them deal with similar themes. the futility yet necessity of memory, the in-between-ness of travel, the way the past lives on in the present and the places we have left behind live on in the places where we have arrived...
favourites: The Disappearing Suite, No More
———
... and in between
discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns
grew out of not knowing to return or to stay, and then became home.
- Chinatowns
something is going, slipping through between forgetting
and remembering, the aura draining from the images,
the absence on the edge a vacuum sucking in the colours,
the living features, the strip of light between Rothko's grey
on black panels fading so slow you think it's staying.
- The Disappearing Suite
On his abacus he clicks the beads of profit:
the anonymity, the fresh slate that sometimes
feels like an epitaph, the new start that seems
like an aftermath, the new country an empty
warehouse where the future hasn't arrived, and the past
hasn't docked to unload the wares.
- The Migrant Ledger
August 7, 2020
A beautiful collection of poetry, though as with any other collection, there were many mediocre poems and some gems. The poems had a clear theme of association with place, but also a very poignant and nostalgic quality about them, especially when talking about his father and grandmother. Attached a few of my favourite parts below for my own reference:
To be desiring, to want to want, you tack along with the procession, wired to a need that will pass you on to another want. (To Markets - Glebe)
To these waiting words addressed to the past or a future waiting to be collected. (Poste Restante)
You scour these Chinatowns of the mind… and in between discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns grew out of not knowing to return or to stay, and then became home. (Chinatown)
To be desiring, to want to want, you tack along with the procession, wired to a need that will pass you on to another want. (To Markets - Glebe)
To these waiting words addressed to the past or a future waiting to be collected. (Poste Restante)
You scour these Chinatowns of the mind… and in between discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns grew out of not knowing to return or to stay, and then became home. (Chinatown)
August 3, 2022
boey kim chengs writing is beautiful.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews