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The
history of the English and their language in Singapore goes back
to the early nineteenth century, when the commercial interests of
the East India Trading Company in the Malaya peninsula transformed
the island first into trading outpost, then into settlement and
colony. The history of poetry in English from Singapore, however,
has a more recent provenance. The period from the 1830s to the 1940s
provides little evidence for the use of English for purposes other
than the pragmatic needs of everyday discourse, business, and trade.
The first attempts at poetry in English were fostered by the opportunities
represented by a university education in the late 1940s, and the
university, along with the mentoring power of older poets and the
canon they have fostered, has continued to play a decisive role
in the development of talent in a country whose history has been
synonymous with its growth as a small, rapidly modernizing metropolis,
in which the community of readers and poets has always been fairly
close, the collective commitment to material and technological betterment
firm, and the paternal presence of the state ubiquitous.
The first book of poems in English to be published from the region
was Wang Gungwu's Pulse (1950), followed by collections from Lim
Thean Soo (1951, 1953) and Edwin Thumboo (1956). The first anthologies
of poetry in English, Litmus One (1958) and 30 Poems (1958), followed
soon after. Since then the corpus of Singapore poetry has grown
to over a hundred volumes from more than fifty poets. (n1) The continued
vitality of English as a creative language in a postnationalist
era is indebted to the retention of English by the state, a significantly
pragmatic choice for an island with four languages, a population
of just over three million, and surrounded by countries which have
reverted to their regional languages. During the 1950s and 1960s,
despite the show of individual talent, the Singaporean interest
in writing in English remained intermittent and isolated, finally
coming into its own during the 1970s, when a number of poets emerged
and matured and the interest in writing found a wider base, allied
to relative ease in finding regional publishers willing to invest
in poetry. During the last two decades this interest has grown exponentially,
and the end of the century has seen lively poetic activity, especially
from young writers, supported by sympathetic media and an audience
within Singapore that continues to increase, in spite of the fact
that writing from Singapore has yet to receive the international
recognition it deserves.
The early poetry was preoccupied with learning how to incorporate
indigenous elements of culture and language into an adopted idiom,
persuading its preestablished conventions of form and style to make
room for localized self-expression. At its most literal, this involved
the forcing of English to accommodate expressions in Malay and Chinese
into the poetic context. The result—Engmalchin—was largely
unsatisfactory, as in the following example from Wang Gungwu (who
was to give up writing in English):
Thoughts of Camford fading,
Contentment creeping in;
Allah had been kind;
Orang puteh has been kind.
Only yesterday his brother said,
‘Can get lagi satu wife lah!’ (n2)
The problem of how a local idiom might grow
in relation to the language of the former colonizer has continued
to remain a challenge for writers in Singapore, as elsewhere. The
state retention of an idealized norm based on British English has
had the effect of forcing all local variants into the category of
Singlish, thus politicising any choice of idiom by a writer between
the standard and the local. In contrast to the failure of Engmalchin,
a poem like “Singapore” by Goh Sin Tub (b. 1927) can
be taken as representative of the more moderate spirit that prevailed
among poets of his generation. (n3) It begins with an image which
has an aura of the familiar: “Day here hurls its light.”
The poet moves quickly from this evocative image to a more prosaic
poetry of statement, which addresses his relation to the changes
being undergone by his country in an earnest and self-preoccupied
tone. The parental community is addressed from a position that bespeaks
an isolation whose romanticism has been dispelled by the somber
fear of social marginalisation. The poem enacts the process of developing
an attitude to the nation while nursing palpable designs on the
reader. The homeland is treated as a landscape and a seascape transformed
from “fresh salt” and “simple hills” into
“a commercial waterway / greased with waste.” The poem
illustrates how Singapore poets are prone to address the nation
in hortatory tones mingled with the anxiety that they speak helplessly
in the wake of the national pursuit of a chimerical progress.
The poet who has mediated most successfully and the longest between
the private and the public voices in Singapore poetry is Edwin Thumboo
(b. 1933), with four collections spread over as many decades: Rib
of Earth (1956), separated by a long gap from Gods Can Die (1977),
followed by Ulysses by the Merlion (1979), and then, with
another gap, by A Third Map: New and Selected Poems (1993).
The series of anthologies he has edited — The Flowering
Tree (1970), Seven Poets (1973), The Second Tongue
(1976), Anthology of ASEAN Literatures (1985), and
Journeys (1995) — has also made him the most influential
factor in the formation of the Singapore canon. Thumboo’s
early poems are few and far between, making up in quality for what
they lack in quantity. When he essays traditional forms, the stanzaic
self-possession aspires to a Yeatsian assurance and poise.
Days squeeze my thoughts
And time transfigured lies
Orion dropped your captive hand
The merbak lonely cries (n4)
Images are used sparingly, but can be striking,
as in “Lallang trimmed with fire” (95) or “Navel
wet before the world was old” (96), or as in “Dregs”:
Day loses its transparency,
The winds fold up and die;
Clouds grow distant in slow streaks
And shadows wither by. (109)
This fluency with traditional metre never
deserts Thumboo’s poetry, but is often held in abeyance by
a preference for free verse, which enables an exorcism of literary
ghosts through the flexibility of the irregular line and the sparing
use of rhyme.
Thumboo’s variations on the lyric mode are held together by
an integrative vision focused on two themes: the interpenetration
of the personal by the historical imagination, and the role of friendship
in the private and the public realms. Myth, symbol, allusion, fable,
and anecdote all are harmonized by the overarching consistency of
these twin concerns. History, for Thumboo, bridges the gap between
the personal and the communal, just as friendship is the communion
of the personal with that which it shares outside the self. History
as a textual narrative and a sequential ordering of events in memory
is harmonized into a knowledge lived in the body of one’s
thoughts and feelings. It exacts its measure of awareness as a form
of re-membering (of the self in relation to other selves), and is
inversely allied to the forgetting we know as indifference to or
abandonment of the Other. Likewise, friendship is not treated merely
as shared experiences, attitudes, and memories, but as the sublation
of differences (of the kind that must be an immanent and imminent
part of any alliance or friendship) in responsibility and care,
as these are allied, inversely, to guilt (as in betrayal) or fear
(not of death, but of being dead to one another). (n5)
Thus, “The Immigrant” acknowledges the migrant’s
choice as a form of gain-in-loss: “Days and Indian days stretch
/ Beyond the grasping of his hands” (115). “9th of August
— II” recognizes the loss-in-gain of Singapore’s
enforced independence from Malaysia: “For us what then? /
Make strangers out of friends / To face each other till the bitter
end” (125). In the wake of the separation of Singapore from
Malaysia (in the early 1960s), “Ibrahim Bin Ahmad” offers
recognition of what is owed in knowledge and fellowship between
communities:
… That Hang Jebat
Broke the selfishness of victory
To put such pride in giving
Was counted among us
These three hundred years or so.
We stood for much. (126)
In Nairobi, “A Brother” recognizes
that “The African can be my brother / When he is most himself”
(127). In “A Letter” friendship is retrievable even
though friends forget to write, just as return to abandoned homelands
is still possible in one of the other poems addressed to the same
friend, “After the Leaving” (188). A poem like “Conversation
with my friend Kwang Min at Loong Kwang of Outram Park” (161)
dramatizes historical time through personalized locales, and the
metonymic fragments of art that can shore up the self against time
and its attritions. Later poems like “Grand Uncles: Kang to
Sinnathamby at Monk’s Hill Terrace” ironize self-reflexivity
more thoroughly by refracting it through ventriloquised selves:
“To Orchard Mall ... perturbed by the new, / Missing the old
… with reservations” (180).
Thumboo has come to represent the formative phase in Singapore’s
history, as the poet laureate of Singapore’s growth into nationhood.
His poems give poetic expression to the drive toward a progressive
harmonization of the four ethnic components of Singapore (Chinese,
Malay, Indian, and Eurasian) into a single collectivity. At a specific
time in the historical development of his country, he understood
the task of poetry in terms of explaining the formation of the nation
to its people. Poets not inclined to take this path have felt that
it entailed a preference for the public over the personal and the
hortatory over the lyrical. The poem by Thumboo that gets the most
attention, in this respect, is “Ulysses by the Merlion.”
It sets up an interaction between Western and local myth as a way
of representing Singapore’s aspiration for unity in diversity,
and for the histories of migration and the struggle for economic
prosperity to be sublated in an achieved identity. The poem has
attracted considerable attention among subsequent poets, who have
all felt obliged to write their own Merlion (or anti-Merlion) poems,
illustrating their anxiety of influence, as well as the continuing
local fascination with the dialectic between a public and a private
role for poets, which Thumboo (as Yeats before him, in the Irish
context) has wanted to sustain as a fruitful rather than a tense
relation between the personal and the public.
Poets of the next generation, however, have generally taken up positions
antithetical to what they perceive as the drives channeling the
resources of their society. Here, for instance, is Robert Yeo (b.
1940):
Father prosperity dispenses
Priorities to his children.
Most things pragmatic prosper
But art (lower-case) has to defer.(n6)
Such an antithesis forces poetry into a corner,
“as if being lonely / Is the alternative to living / In Singapore”
(132). But the poet is honest enough to admit that
Yes, it feels good to be
Able to come back to
A still rather chaste
Absolutely safe
Absurdly clean
Incredibly green
Familiar and cosy
Home. (134)
Such honesty is scrupulous and characteristic
of Yeo, who is well known locally as a playwright as well as a novelist.
But such honesty also dissipates the sharpness of critique.
Yeo’s friend and slightly younger contemporary, Kirpal Singh
(b. 1949), the author of three volumes of poetry, has been sharper
and less ameliorative in his resistance. In a poem like “Making
Omelettes” he plays up to the role of temperamental (and,
in his case, also ethnic) insider-as-outsider, making a meal of
a typecasting he cannot resist, thus giving new teeth to an old
saw. The humor disguises no part of what is being treated allegorically
as a fable of power and powerlessness in a multiracial society that
has worked hard at making the ethnic pieces of the jigsaw hold together
without cutting one another too obviously.
… and I begin now to think about
the eggs we crack
and how sometimes the shell is so hard the egg refuses to
crack as if to say, not me, no me — get him, get her but
not me and so the story goes on about the eggs which are
small and big, brown and white, chickens and ducks and
eggs which invite cracking and make you feel very hungry
… (n7)
The temptations to which poets often succumb
in Singapore are the romantic notion that one can achieve selfhood
by separating oneself from the commonality, and its corollary belief
that a self alienated from the drives of its society can subsist
by making a value of that alienation. The most original and interesting
such poet is Arthur Yap (b. 1943), whose poetic career stretches
over more than a quarter-century, from only lines (1971),
through the collective five takes (1974), commonplace
(1977), and Down the Line (1980), to Man Snake Apple
& Other Poems (1986).
On the surface, Yap’s poems can appear odd, weird, eccentric,
or willfully obscure and oblique: they drop the upper case and,
with it, many of the forms of syntax and cohesion by which the conventions
of interpersonal communication are normally sustained. This e.e.
cummings aspect of deliberately dressing as a private (a rebel in
an army full of beribboned officers) makes the point that nonconformity
is as much a matter of principle as of temperament. Beyond affect,
what it accomplishes is a mimesis or correspondence between a fractured
syntax and a newly and gingerly put-together sense of the world,
as if the shattered bits of what might once have been whole had
been pieced together with care, wonder, pain, and amazement, into
configurations which add up to meaning in a new way that revises
our notions of how meaning is constituted in poems out of words
arranged as lines. Here is a part of “things”:
chair
wall
window
desk
bed …
in being hung up like a portrait, truly dead.
medium shot: window. Open it.
let the sun in, let suicide out.
before hitting the ground, frame it in slow motion.
Reverse repeat, pan it back to window, its source
… (n8)
But many Yap poems are not dependent on such
a redrawing of the wheel. Their novelty resides not in telescopic
syntax but in how metaphors merge in synesthesia. Here, for instance,
is a traditional poetic motif transfigured by “dawn”:
dawn in the quiet key of light
utters a whole paragraph of hues
in the early mutter of an aviary. …
The lively key to morning
is mysteriously sharp, already laden
with the still, angular mirrors of noon. (63)
Yap’s poems are alert to the nuances
of the spoken idiom, making him particularly skillful in his delineation
of the objects of implicit social satire. “2 mothers in a
h b playground” has justifiably become a classic, immediately
accessible, enormously funny, and devastating in its implicit critique.
Yap has a keen and neutral ear for mimicry, and can ventriloquise
intonation as fluently as he can disguise his own in studied ambiguity.
The poem “an afternoon nap” castigates the mother castigating
her child:
the ambitious mother across the road
is at it again. Proclaiming her goodness
she beats the boy. Shouting out his wrongs, with raps
she begins with his mediocre report-book grades. …
Swift are all her contorted movements,
Apt for every need; no soft gradient
Of a consonant-vowel figure, she lumbers
& shrieks, a hit for every 2 notes missed. (60)
The resistance offered by Yap is directed
not at national entities like State and Nation, but at the ordinary
people whose lives conform to denials of faith in and responsiveness
to what their conformity blinds them to. The poetry is full of perceptiveness
rather than anger or reproach, and leavened by a sharp verbal wit
and wryly sardonic irony, alert to the treacherous aspects of the
promise held forth by language that it can be adequate to every
quirk of feeling, thought, and idea, and not simply leave us stranded
with the feeling that “the word swallows up the world”
(129). Yap also offers the honesty of a deep ambivalence about much
that is reflected troublingly in the mirror of his sensibility,
aware of the distortions to be found there, unwilling to resolve
them into more clarity than honesty would live with.
Yap, Yeo, and Singh could be said to belong to the second generation
of poets from Singapore, along with Chandran Nair (b. 1944) and
a handful of others like Geraldine Heng, who was the first woman
from Singapore to publish a volume of poetry in English (whitedreams,
1976). Wong May (b. 1943) grew up in Singapore, and published A
Bad Girl’s Book of Animals earlier than Heng’s
volume, in 1969, but she is originally from New York. Nair and Heng
practically abandoned poetry after the 1970s; but all of these poets
began writing in the late 1960s, and all of them reinforced the
dissident tradition of voicing anxieties about the poetic self in
relation to the community and the cost of some of its aspirations.
Lee Tzu Pheng (b. 1946) belongs to the same generation, but began
publishing poems a decade later, rapidly achieving widespread recognition
through four slim volumes: Prospect of a Drowning (1980),
Against the Next Wave (1988), The Brink of an Amen
(1991), and Lambada by Galilee & Other Surprises (1997).
Lee writes in a poetic idiom based loosely on the British poetic
tradition, in the sense that her diction and syntax are chaste,
and her progress through a poem is always decorous and well managed,
enriching the reader’s awareness without ruffling the poem’s
deportment, as in, say, Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Christina
Rossetti or Elizabeth Jennings.
The entire tradition of poetry in Singapore works within the conventions
of the lyric poem, and Lee is its neatest exponent. Her poems yield
richly to the literate reader accustomed to close reading, sympathetic
to resonant images, sensitive emotions, and feelings delineated
with clarity and precision, through a structured argument that pleases
by not being obvious. In her early poems the poetic voice was always
close to the poet’s self, although in her most recent volume
she has diversified the monologic effect of personal statement with
the oblique ironies of dramatized voices.
Two poems stand out from the even tenor of subdued personal feelings
that characterize Lee’s first volume: “Bukit Timah,
Singapore” and “My Country and My People.” Both
offer memorable utterances on the public theme so dear to poets
in Singapore: the changes that have rapidly transformed a sleepy
kampong village culture into “the megapolitan appetite.”
(n9) Both start a poet's quarrel with the country, commemorate a
past that has vanished ineluctably, and gaze apprehensively on the
future already unfolding steadily across the body politic. Both
acknowledge a need to resist, but also a need to acknowledge the
logic of what cannot simply be resisted. Scrupulous, descriptive,
and fair-minded, they resist resistance even as they access critique,
without straining the resources of either.
Lee’s second volume shows an expansion of scope. Her interest
in children’s literature and in the power of myth and fairy
tale to animate human suffering, and the knowledge acquired through
pain, finds expression in poems like “Grimm Story” and
“Thorn-Rose: The Bad Fairy’s Version.” Here is
the beginning of the latter poem:
Deep within the womb of sleep
Her innocence and beauty she surrenders
To no one; life breathes unhurried
In a peaceful deathlessness;
And who is free
As she is in seclusion
Where none can fall or weep
Because of her, whose enchantment keeps her
Inviolate, in that safehold of thorns
Her fate conjures? (n10)
Lee’s Christianity comes to the fore
in her third volume, The Brink of an Amen, the reader encounters
it as a process personal to the poet, shared without presumption.
The language acquires a confidently quiet force considerably more
effective than the somewhat subdued manner of the first two volumes.
Here, for instance, is “Babel”:
Even as we taste
the powerful lure of words
our speech fails on our tongues
to dialects of blood.
Where have we the skill
to tell the human lot,
when all our words divide
and cannot make us whole? (n11)
The range of topics and techniques is considerably
enlarged, giving us one of the most richly satisfying of volumes
in English from Singapore. Irony makes a humorous and perceptive
entry. The elegiac poems balance feeling with repose. The play on
words is precise and resonant in an economical way, as in “Inventory”:
headstern
heartstrong
fine-eyed
footlong
softmouthed
selfweaned
wakesome
wisemined
youngblood
youthsbane
lastfound
lifesgain (60)
Lee’s most recent volume consolidates
the achievement of her third book, with sharper ironies and a keener
sense of the feminine. Here is the ending of “Graffiti in
the Ladies”:
You wonder if it's shock or shame
that you feel. Or maybe both.
It's easy to say
someone hysterical did this.
Does violence have a gender?
Has woman been clapped so much in her place
she has no room to face her demons
but the public lavatory?
Surely this vandalizing speaks much more
than the writing on the wall? (n12)
Yeo, Singh, Nair, and Lee represent the second
generation of poets writing in English from Singapore. Writers like
Leong Liew Geok (b. 1947) and Hoh Poh Fun (b. 1946) have made their
appearance on the stage of Singapore poetry in English at a later
date. Leong is the author of two volumes, Love Is Not Enough
(1991) and Women Without Men (1999). Despite the titles,
Leong does not write on lesbian or feminist themes, but works out
a position from which men can be perceived in a more down-to-earth
way and women can develop independent selves without becoming typecast
in sexist roles. Hoh’s Katong and Other Poems
(1994) is the work of a person with a subdued yet refined sensibility,
which is at its most pleasing when it deals with nature.
A third, younger generation, most of them born after 1960, is currently
very active in Singapore, comprising Angeline Yap, Simon Tay, Desmond
Sim, Koh Buck Song, Felix Cheong, Paul Tan, Gwee Li Sui, Aaron Lee
Soon Yong, Yong Shu Hoong, and several others. Other poets of interest,
who do not quite fit in within the otherwise plausible three-generation
narrative, include Elangovan — primarily a writer in Tamil,
though also the author of Transcreations (1988), a bilingual
collection of poems in Tamil and English — and Robert Vaughan
Jenkins (born in Singapore, and a Singapore citizen since 1992),
the author of From the Belly of the Carp: Singapore River
Voices (1996), which breaks free of the otherwise dominant local
preference for the lyric form to give voice to a series of dramatized
monologues which offer a discursive survey of local character types
and several partly overlapping personalized histories centred on
the Singapore River.
From the diverse group who began writing in the already affluent,
technocratic, and efficient society of 1980s Singapore, Boey Kim
Cheng (b. 1965) is perhaps the most interesting. The author of three
volumes, he currently lives away from Singapore, in Australia. Boey's
poetry is characterized by three features: intensity, restlessness,
and a prodigal gift for metaphor. The intensity with which he takes
himself and his themes has something almost Rilkean in its self-absorbed
introversion, its lack of irony, and its portentous striving for
a larger significance to the life of things and persons, which would
be religious were it less turbulent. Here is the brief “Sunset”
from his first volume:
The house of man
sits on a quiet hill
and meditates,
absorbing the last words:
the hard membrane
of its windows
suddenly moistening. (n13)
The poetry is sophisticated, capable of absorbing
a broad cultural awareness into its fabric. The relation of the
poet to his country has an abrasive element that can be sampled
from “The Planners”:
The country wears perfect rows
of shining teeth.
Anaesthesia, amnesia, hypnosis.
They have the means.
They have it all so it will not hurt,
so history is new again.
The piling will not stop.
The drilling goes right through
The fossils of last century. (n14)
Beyond the animus against Singapore, there
is the temperament of a wanderer: “I am swayed by an inner
music / of irresolution. There will be a lot of pondering / up and
down the length of this street, and other streets, / beyond this
American dream, before the rolling stops / and I come home, wherever,
whatever, that is.” (n15) Boey is a gift that has yet to accommodate
itself properly with the world.
Of the younger poets with one or more volumes to their credit, the
most interesting are Alvin Pang (b. 1972) and Alfian Sa'at (b. 1977),
whose second volume is to appear in late 2000. Pang’s Testing
the Silence (1997) is characterized by a sensitive restraint of
feeling combined with tact and delicacy of expression. He handles
the short irregular line in free verse with skill, and makes a virtue
of understatement.
Light
like an Impressionst’s brush
dapples
the glistening
fish-skin
of water
one bright scale
at a time.(n16)
The poetry stands close to silence, aware
of the burden of words, as in “Sound and Fury”: “We
reach out / into the superfluity of words / Silence. And bring back
/ ourselves and our burdens emptied / of real value. Emptied”
(27).
In contrast, Sa'at is more vigorous and energetic. His ear for language
as sound is acute in respect of social nuance as well as poetic
rhythm. He harnesses syntactic repetition as a principle of organization
very effectively in a number of poems that use the technique of
listing a catalogue to build up the momentum of poems into powerful
litanies of expressiveness. His “Singapore You Are Not My
Country” takes the tradition of the poet's engagement with
his country to a new level of rhetorical excitement:
Singapore I am on trial.
These are the whites of my eyes and the reds of my
wrists.
These are the deranged stars of my schizophrenia.
This is the milk latex gummy moon of my sedated smile.
I have lost a country to images, it is as simple as
that.
Singapore you have a name on a map but no maps to your
name.
This will not do… (n17)
This is the final entry in one of the most
exciting volumes of poetry to come out of Singapore. It bespeaks
the health of what, in a Yeatsian frame of mind, one may speak of
as a necessary lover’s quarrel with the world, or, in a Marvellian
frame of mind, as a dialogue between Created State and Resolved
Soul.
(n1) Celebrations: Singapore
Creative Writing in English, ed. Gene Tan, Singapore, National
Library, 1994, pp. 44?67. Lists 84 volumes of poetry in English
from 48 poets, and 34 anthologies and collections.
(n2) Quoted in Anne Brewster, Towards
a Semiotic of Post-Colonial Discourse: University Writing in Singapore
and Malaysia 1949-1965, Singapore, Heinemann Asia / Centre
for Advanced Studies, 1989, p. 4.
(n3) Goh Sin Tub, “Singapore,”
in Seven Poets: Singapore and Malaysia, ed. Edwin Thumboo,
Singapore, Singapore University Press, 1973, pp. 97?99.
(n4) Edwin Thumboo, “Louise,”
in Ee Tiang Hong, Responsibility and Commitment: The Poetry
of Edwin Thumboo, ed. Leong Liew Geok, Singapore, Centre for
Advanced Studies / Singapore University Press, 1997, p. 107.
(n5) An entire thematics of care is alluded
to in Martin Heidegger, “Care is being-toward-death,”
Being and Time, tr. Joan Stambaugh, Albany, State University
of New York Press, 1996, p. 303.
(n6) Robert Yeo, Leaving Home, Mother:
Selected Poems, Singapore, Angsana Books, 1999, p.131.
(n7) Kirpal Singh, Catwalking and the
Games We Play, Singapore, Ethos Books, 1998, p.31.
(n8) Arthur Yap, the space of city trees:
selected poems, London, Skoob Books, 2000, p.67.
(n9) Lee Tzu Pheng, “Bukit Timah, Singapore,”
in Prospect of a Drowning, Singapore, Heinemann, 1980,
p.50.
(n10) Lee Tzu Pheng, Against the Next
Wave, Singapore, Times Books, 1988, p.47.
(n11) Lee Tzu Pheng, The Brink of an
Amen, Singapore, Times Books, 1991, p.29.
(n12) Lee Tzu Pheng, Lambada by Galilee
& Other Surprises, Singapore, Times Books, 1997, p.35.
(n13) Boey Kim Chang, Somewhere-Bound,
Singapore, Times Books, 1989, p.40.
(n14) Boey Kim Chang, Another Place,
Singapore, Times Books, 1993, p.63.
(n15) Boey Kim Chang, Days of No Name,
Singapore, EPB, 1996, p.51.
(n16) Alvin Pang, Testing the Silence,
Singapore, Ethos Books, 1997, p.53.
(n17) Alfian Sa'at, One Fierce Hour,
Singapore, Landmark Books, 1998, p.41.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Rajeev S.
Patke
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): LeBreton, Singapore River, 1839, Iithograph
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Goupil, Singapore and the Singapore River,
1839, lithograph
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Kirpal Singh
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Alfian Sa'at
By Rajeev S. Patke, National University
of Singapore
Rajeev S. Patke is Associate Professor in the
Department of English at the National University of Singapore. Educated
at the Universities of Poona (India) and Oxford, he is the author
of The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens (1985) and coeditor
of Institutions in Cultures: Theory and Practice (1996).
Recently he produced for the NUS a CD of poets reading their own
work, "Singapore Poetry in English."
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