In an interview Jee Leong Koh describes himself as ‘a lyric poet in an anti-lyric age’. He goes on to criticise the lyric ‘I’ in robust, post-modern terms, while defending the lyric itself as ‘answering to some very deep human need for complex music made by the human voice.’ There is a wide variety in content in this first UK collection, and, in part, that variety does offer complex varieties of music. That music is often very elegant and graceful, though Koh is perfectly capable of moving through the gears where the subject matter demands it.
Koh’s variety of subject matter includes some very beautiful poems about his mother and the kinds of menial labour she has undertaken in Koh’s native Singapore. One such is ‘Ashtrays as Big as Hubcaps’ in which ‘The toilet bowl was a handy place to wash the big ashtrays/ but she guessed the work argued with your wobbly stomach.’ Or ‘The Hospital Lift’ where ‘My mother is the aged Queen of the spin/ of washing machines. Her body sags now/ but when she was young-eyed and toned/ she washed St Andrew’s Children’s Hospital,/ whose best feature was its ancient lift.’ Koh’s skill is, through his love of his mother, to see her exactly in a place, thus depicting both the woman and her situation in it, and evoking a milieu of Singaporean life which might not otherwise be accessible.
Singaporean poetry has, somewhat inevitably, been a site for working with and thus examining the phenomenon which is Singlish; that version of English which has evolved as part of the post-colonial legacy of the island. Involved in that legacy was Lee Kwan Yu’s drive for Singapore to be a ‘first world country in a third world area’. Thus, for Mr Lee, English had to be the first language of Singapore, in a country where English, Malay, Tamil and Mandarin were equally present. Writers such as Alvin Pang have written poetry playing with and in Singlish as a corrective to and reflection on the drive to capitalism which the dominant politics in Singapore has demanded. Koh has several poems which use or comment on Singlish. One such is the fine ‘Talking to Koon Meng Who Called Himself Christopher’. The narrator is ‘T’cher’ who’s just played football with his charges in a game his team has lost. The boys talk about the boredom of school and one ‘Jin Sheng who christened himself Nicholas’, tells his teaching that he had ‘missed the Express class/ by four points only’. Koh’s skill here is to report the boy’s Singlish conversation, such that the boys’ ambivalence to this very competitive education system is deftly depicted. Another such poem is ‘Attribution’ which reports Koh’s near sending-down from Oxford for plagiarism, ‘because where I came from everyone plagiarised’. Koh ends the poem with a comment on both that practice and Singlish ‘Often the words I write have confusing beginnings/ and none can tell what belongs to the British, my grandfather or me.’
The best poems in this fine book are ones where Koh takes on a sense of surreal exoticism as in ‘You Know, Don’t You’, in which Koh depicts the stories we tell ourselves to get through our lives, ‘They’re edging their stories past the past/ and making them up presently as they leave/ the bar. What do they think they’re doing?// I don’t know. The waves rise again and crash/ over them, as they flag down a cruising cab./ The torrential air, invisible and powerful,/ drives them in, and slams the door after them.’ In these poems, the grace and elegance mentioned above mix with Koh’s imagination, to create a fine sense of play in his material. The final effect is a charged, nuanced lyricism.
Ian Pople