{"id":5035,"date":"2015-09-13T18:13:33","date_gmt":"2015-09-13T17:13:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5035"},"modified":"2016-01-23T14:45:01","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T13:45:01","slug":"jee-leong-koh-steep-tea-carcanet-9-99-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5035","title":{"rendered":"Jee Leong Koh, <em>Steep Tea<\/em> (Carcanet Press) \u00a39.99"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In an interview Jee Leong Koh describes himself as \u2018a lyric poet in an anti-lyric age\u2019.\u00a0 He goes on to criticise the lyric \u2018I\u2019 in robust, post-modern terms, while defending the lyric itself as \u2018answering to some very deep human need for complex music made by the human voice.\u2019 \u00a0There is a wide variety in content in this first UK collection, and, in part, that variety does offer complex varieties of music.\u00a0 That music is often very elegant and graceful,\u00a0 though Koh is perfectly capable of moving through the gears where the subject matter demands it.<\/p>\n<p>Koh\u2019s variety of subject matter includes some very beautiful poems about his mother and the kinds of menial labour she has undertaken in Koh\u2019s native Singapore.\u00a0 One such is \u2018Ashtrays as Big as Hubcaps\u2019 in which \u2018The toilet bowl was a handy place to wash the big ashtrays\/ but she guessed the work argued with your wobbly stomach.\u2019 Or \u2018The Hospital Lift\u2019 where \u2018My mother is the aged Queen of the spin\/ of washing machines.\u00a0 Her body sags now\/ but when she was young-eyed and toned\/ she washed St Andrew\u2019s Children\u2019s Hospital,\/ whose best feature was its ancient lift.\u2019 \u00a0Koh\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>Singaporean poetry has, somewhat inevitably, been a site for working with and thus examining the phenomenon which is Singlish;\u00a0 that version of English which has evolved as part of the post-colonial legacy of the island.\u00a0 Involved in that legacy was Lee Kwan Yu\u2019s drive for Singapore to be a \u2018first world country in a third world area\u2019.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 One such is the fine \u2018Talking to Koon Meng Who Called Himself Christopher\u2019.\u00a0 The narrator is \u2018T\u2019cher\u2019 who\u2019s just played football with his charges in a game his team has lost.\u00a0 The boys talk about the boredom of school and one \u2018Jin Sheng who christened himself Nicholas\u2019, tells his teaching that he had \u2018missed the Express class\/ by four points only\u2019.\u00a0 Koh\u2019s skill here is to report the boy\u2019s Singlish conversation, such that the boys\u2019 ambivalence to this very competitive education system is deftly depicted. Another such poem is \u2018Attribution\u2019 which reports Koh\u2019s near sending-down from Oxford for plagiarism, \u2018because where I came from everyone plagiarised\u2019.\u00a0 Koh ends the poem with a comment on both that practice and Singlish \u2018Often the words I write have confusing beginnings\/ and none can tell what belongs to the British, my grandfather or me.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>The best poems in this fine book are ones where Koh takes on a sense of surreal exoticism as in \u2018You Know, Don\u2019t You\u2019,\u00a0 in which Koh depicts the stories we tell ourselves to get through our lives, \u2018They\u2019re edging their stories past the past\/ and making them up presently as they leave\/ the bar. What do they think they\u2019re doing?\/\/ I don\u2019t 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.\u2019 In these poems, the grace and elegance mentioned above mix with Koh\u2019s imagination, to create a fine sense of play in his material. The final effect is a charged, nuanced lyricism.<br \/>\n&nbsp;<br \/>\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In an interview Jee Leong Koh describes himself as \u2018a lyric poet in an anti-lyric age\u2019.\u00a0 He goes on to criticise the lyric \u2018I\u2019 in robust, post-modern terms, while defending the lyric itself as \u2018answering to some very deep human need for complex music made by the human voice.\u2019 \u00a0There is a wide variety in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - 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