Squatting Quietly - The Straits Times, Life!, 2000
The End of His Orbit - The Straits Times, Life!, 2001
The End of His Orbit - The Arts Magazine, 2002
Below: Absence - The Arts Magazine, 2003
Unmarked Treasure - Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, 2004
Unmarked Treasure - The Business Times, 2004
Still Flight - The Straits Times, Life!, 2005
Still Flight (Chamber, The Arts House) - The Straits Times, Life!, 2005
Like A Seed With Its Singular Purpose - The Straits Times, Lifestyle - Read, 2006
Like A Seed With Its Singular Purpose - IS Magazine, 2006
Like A Seed With Its Singular Purpose - South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), 2006
Excess Baggage & Claim - IS Magazine, 2007
Excess Baggage & Claim - The Sunday Times, 2007
Excess Baggage & Claim - ABC Radio National, 2007
Excess Baggage & Claim - The Australian, 2007
Tilting Our Plates To Catch The Light - IS Magazine, 2007
Tilting Our Plates To Catch The Light - Kakiseni.com, 2007
Tilting Our Plates To Catch The Light - The Sunday Times, 2008
Review of Squatting Quietly
by Aaron Lee in Straits Times Life! 02 Sep 2000
Let me sit here for a minute. A moment away from the present. A moment away from myself. - 'as if, by this', Cyril Wong
THIS debut poetry collection by 23-year-old undergraduate Cyril Wong contains the kind of poetry you read when you want to pause, muse and reflect on life.
The collection of 34 poems is, as poet-academic Professor Edwin Thumboo says in his introduction, "one of the more important volumes (of poetry) to appear in the last two to three years".
This is high praise for a first book; and even more so for a poet as young as Wong. The approbation is justly earned. The poems here display a true poet's sensibility and show that Wong can translate ordinary experiences into poetic insight.
Adopting a posture of quiescence (the better with which to observe human behaviour), he is able to enter each moment completely and sensitively, to shape and record his understanding of each occurrence.
He does so through what Prof Thumboo calls a unique "distancing of the self", in which Wong has become "simultaneously the moving centre and the observer" to yield a poetry that contains a "remarkable inwardness".
The seven poems in the first part of the book demonstrate this technique superbly -- they form a series of introspectives: exploring the mental, emotional and spiritual landscape of the poet while making reference to his external surroundings.
In poems like Number Ten This Morning and Fictional Sorrows, Wong watches the world bustle about its business with a detachment that borders on the solipsistic.
The voice he adopts, or is forced by circumstance to adopt, is the point of view of the dislocated observer: "Every day, as the days/ moved on in perfect clarity/ without me, I would leave/ ... only/ to run into myself again" (Neon, on toilet walls with their).
However, in each poem, there is detail that reveals his attempts to capture key moments of dialogue, activity or occurrences.
He does this in a variety of ways. Minor epiphany is imagistic in its approach in describing the simple fact of rain: "Each one/ exquisite and whole./ Perfectly shaped./ But they/ hit the ground./ Every single one."
Meditative, measured and controlled, his poetry nevertheless echoes a feminine sensibility in its empathy, subtlety and delicacy of expression. He takes unexpected risks in utilising the "gender of language", at times using the feminine voice in a persona role-reversal.
The poem, along these corridors, like the others in the second part of the collection, evidences the poet's search for connectedness, born out of a deep and central loneliness and unspoken pain: Will you stay, even as emptiness runs ubiquitous along these corridors?
Another poem, epithalamium, articulates exquisitely his anxieties about the end of love: Kissing your fingers, I glimpse your palm, a map of roads, revealing then how you were going to escape.
The third section of the book focuses on the poet's relationship with his family. His disconnectedness extends to his sense of homelessness: "I have become/ a foreigner/ in my own home" (unmade bed).
Young enough to live under the shadow of parental authority, yet mature enough to need a sense of individual identity, Wong feels trapped in a state of permanent disembodiment, with only more uncertainty in store: I am really its spirit, Trapped between the past And that other place.
The complexity of his problematic relationship with his father is explored in poems like Another Suitcase and Cockroach.
It is significant that Wong ends the collection with a surrealist piece about home called afloat in a dress too large, which has the closing lines: There is a road behind this house. I can see it from my bedroom window, disappearing into the trees, leading nowhere.
Following the narrative thread of the poems, one gets the sense that Wong feels profoundly and observes carefully. His poetic voice, which evinces a "distancing of the self", is linked intimately to his worldview and may well have been formed by personal pain and affliction of circumstance.
This collection shows that, far from being self-indulgent or self-pitying, he is making every attempt to rise above it; to portray each experience for what it is while rendering each moment of joy or despair as accurately as a photograph.
It is a testimony to his spirit and character that he has been able to elevate personal observation to the level of art.
Review of The End Of His Orbit
by Alvin Pang in Straits Times Life! 15 Dec 2001It might be considered blasphemous in literary circles to regard anyone but the prodigious and celebrated Alfian Sa'at as the premier poet of this generation.
But I venture this heresy: that in 24-year-old Cyril Wong, Singapore has found the pre-eminent visionary love poet of our age.
While Alfian has mastered the rhetoric of performed ideology, it is Wong who has more earnestly probed the trickier terrain of the unmasked self.
His latest volume, The End Of His Orbit, evinces the phenomenal maturation that has taken place since his first book. Wong's poetry craft is no longer the jittery knife-edge of Squatting Quietly (1999), but a more precise, surgical instrument.
Orbit is not so much a sequel as a meatier coda to Squatting Quietly, extending and deepening the same constellation of themes: family, loneliness, sexual angst and love.
Not surprisingly, critics have placed Wong in the confessional mode of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. There is evidence to support their claims, given Wong's favoured tropes and his insistence on an intensely personalised point of reference.
The first person "I" dominates the volume: Wong is not a poet of sweeping social mores and political landscapes, but of deeply private moments, illuminated keenly, even harshly, by heightened awareness.
But as Alfian - who pens the volume's Preface as a verse offering in his inimitable style - asserts, Wong's poetry transcends the trappings and excesses of the Confessional school, such as their penchant for solipsism, borderline hysteria and self-indulgent declamations of suffering.
True, the best poems in Orbit are taut with intimate metaphor, often resembling wounds sutured and scarred into patterns of loss.
But it is archaeology, not history or psychology, that may prove the most helpful discipline in unearthing the embedded freight of Wong's poems, in which bodies and selves are so often rendered transposable with furniture and objects that their meanings blend and blur.
The success of Wong's poems lies in the way they manage to infuse perfectly ordinary actions with intensity and meaning. Human actions are rendered artifact: defamiliarised yet sharpened to significance by Wong's relentlessly detached free-verse line.
Hence, a dish of cooked crab, "chest in pieces,/ spooned and well-dug,/ emptied" becomes a metaphor for his mother's inner grief in one poem; in another, the veins in a man's arms become "tightened strings/ over a parcel that would not open."
Wong's poetic orbit remains, with an almost voyeuristic fervour, around the human form in its hitherto unwitnessed routines. It is as if he is convinced that insight and authenticity is to be found entwined within the husk of daily lives and everyday routines: from cooking to dressing or simply the way a cup is carried from one end of a room to another.
Yet his poetic gaze is not clandestine; instead, the private body, transfigured by associative meaning and emotional context, becomes:
at once nothing and
everything you can possibly
take
(to meet your sky)In other words, it becomes both re-humanised and forever out of reach to an outsider, at once testimony and disproval of testament.
This could also be the reason why the latter sections of Orbit, A Bishop From Another Century and Red Riding - his most self-consciously meta-poetic - are also the least convincing in feeling and scope.
These poems, dealing with issues of authorship, the art of writing, and reworked (but well-worn) myths from Red Riding Hood to King Kong, are competent enough but lack the emotional heart and unflinching torn veil of vision that power the rest of the book.
Good poets share the secret knowledge they have gleaned from the world. Only the best poets teach us how to see as they see, that we may witness the world's - or the heart's - inner tickings, for ourselves.
Wong has already demonstrated clear signs of such mastery, and has years of writing ahead of him.
Cyril Wong, like many young Singapore poets, demonstrates confidence and delicacy in that overwhelmingly dominant poetic mode - the lyric. The sheer range of prosodic skills he employs to evoke uncanny, sensual, sometimes brutally open emotional vignettes between his various personae and their addresses is impressive. Neatly organised sections contain apostrophes, odes and elegies to parents, lovers, friends and teachers, to the poet himself, to parts of his body and his name, and in a final section he hands the lyric first person over to historical and mythical personae, a brief series of witty alternative perspectives.
Review of The End Of His Orbit
by John Phillips in The Arts Magazine (2002)
Yet impressive prosody alone would not be sufficient reason to celebrate this new collection, which emerges in a field crowded with competent examples of the genre. The lyric mode in the context of a stark consumerism (Rajeev Patke has called it "the somnambulism of the lyric") too often amounts to little more than well turned similes or startling metaphors in the descriptive service of emotions often found better evoked in popular music and soap opera ("he descended/Into the couch like a coffin/Into a hole in the ground").
Wong's poems surpass the blandness of the contemporary lyric by interrogating the rules of naming and address (the titles are often dedications or puzzled reflections on names). Thus the poems tread figuratively between a fear of confinement and a cautiously candid openness.
Wong's latest collection begins with a fantastic conceit. foetus evokes, through its metaphor, the work of a metaphor itself, bringing something out of nothing and inaugurating a pattern of self-reference that sustains the volume. The final poem, happiness, questions the gathering repetitiveness of false starts, looking back to childhood and forward "twenty years from now" to imagine the poet "choked once more with / Poems about hopelessness". below: absence situates itself between imaginary moments before memory and beyond anticipation.
Review of Below: Absence
by John Phillips in The Arts Magazine (2003)
Wong's sustained meditation on the nothingness from which the poems seem to have emerged, allows its counterpoint (above: context of light) to gather strength as the collection proceeds. white of the paper and fixed positions both convey with delicate precision the paradoxes of the poet's craft; the latter particularly impressive in its embedding of poem within commentary and vice-versa. Even the weaker confessional lyrics avoid awkwardness in their focus on the intimate illogicality of the everyday. The four longer poems that close the collection are evidence to allay the fear of "continuous desperation" that the final lines evoke. His is an affirmation of emptiness in a time and place where this is barely possible.
Review of Unmarked Treasure
by Robert Yeo in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Apr - Jun 2004This substantial book of poems, Cyril's fourth in five years, is best read by reference to two sentences at the back of the book and a page of contents listing the poems in it, which is not in the book.
In the back of the book are the two sentences: 'A ghost steps out of its body after a suicide and looks back at it in wonder. The poet wonders at his own existence and struggles between actual living and the desire to die.'
Link these to the contents page, which he sent me upon request, and the whole book containing fifty-three pages begins to make sense. Thus, the list of poems, to take just the first ten poems, looks like this:End SongThe majority of poems, with unitalicised titles, appear to be doubly framed: one, by the voice of the ghost, and two, as photographic references to people who have killed themselves and these are invisible snapshots. There are six invisible snapshots and the first alludes to Leslie Cheung, the late Hong Kong movie star.
Invisible Snapshot
A rush upwards, then to perch...
First Home
Turning Back
Flight Dreams
Notes to a Suicide
It is a choice...
The Affair
By framing, I mean that the out-of-body experiences of the ghost introduce and link the rest of the poems thematically while the invisible snapshots reinforce instances of death, whether literal or figurative. Figuratively, the death referred to is that of the non-existent love between the poet's parents which leave them, and the poet, distraught. As an example, poem 2 of 'mother's steps to sanity' has her monologing:I am walking on a tightropeWhile many people are mentioned as dedications, especially in the invisible snapshots (for Leslie Cheung, after Jason Wee) the main characters in this book are the poet, his sister, father and mother. They are a dysfunctional family as the father is in denial about his son's homosexuality, which alienates him from his wife, daughter and son. Mother struggles and continues to love her son, her daughter could not care less and symptomatically goes to pubs and dates angmoh men.
and behind me is a long
line of women
who were never loved
by the men they married.
The poet has given the best lines to his mother. The bond between mother and son is so strong that the voices of both fuse in a joined monologue as a gesture of their inseparableness in 'mother doesn't get it'. She says:I don't know why I don't know love.I don't know why my sister sleeps with white men and likes it.I don't know why I don't like sex.I don't know why I turned into my mother no matter how hard I resisted.Despite his atheism, he is forced to recognize the power of her love and the result are among the best poems in this collection, in particular the three-part poems 'god is our mother' and 'mother's step to sanity'. These are tender lyrics that pay homage to mother as godlike in her loving omniscience and infinite love.Maybe we gave upHe combines this with touching domestic details from the same poem:
too easily when our mother
never stopped trying.
Maybe we are the sinners too.God is our motherAt the root of mother problems is the fact that her son is gay and her husband's rejection and its corrosive effects on the family is the consequence. Naturally there are poems that explore the father's denial: as these lines from 'letter to araya rasdjarmrearnsook' show:
who creeps into our rooms at night......He is watchingNonetheless, the poet is not about to change his sexual preference and there are candid love poems like the one just quoted, 'promiscuity', 'holiday cruise', 'a kind of hush' and 'heavy sleeve' that explore this, sometimes with a lingering sense of guilt and shame, as these lines from 'a kind of hush' show:
the news again, Araya. If I had been
born a girl and my sister a boy
it would have made more sense, as
then he would have no problem
loving us, Araya.All at once, ripples would fleeMore often, there is a consciousness of the bodily contact that finds expressions in discreet honesty that reminds me of the poems of Thom Gunn in his The Man with Night Sweats (1992).
in a singular, outward direction
these questions of guilt or
blame...
Put this passage from Gunn's 'The Hug',I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,Next to Wong's 'heavy sleeve',
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder blades against your chest...Your shirt now opensand similarities become apparent. Both poets have made stylistic choices in their preference for the bare understatement that is in sharp contrast to the in-your-face "pressing his cock to my thigh" approach of Allen Ginsberg in, say, a poem like 'Many Loves'.
wider around your neck,
as if from the sheer
weight of sleeves, disclosing
further the unsunned
white of your shoulders,
broadening the vision
of your collar-bone...
If I have given the impression that these are gloomy poems about death and denial, then I am wrong. Many poems are shot through with two positives: the first is the attempt to transcend the breaking of love by building bridges (there is a poem called 'bridges'); the second is the manner in which the poet manages to fashion poetry out of these searing circumstances, almost like Philip Larkin who wrote, "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were to Wordsworth." There is a self-consciousness about this that is apparent, for example, in this quotation from 'almost':My existence is one of sweetestTwo other features need noticing and that is the fact that the poet's wonderment at his own existence often takes him back into dream-like states of childhood and in these instances the poet hovers between body and the spirit that lifts him above the material into a tranced state. The image of flying is intended. One instance will suffice and this comes from 'last dream':
boredom, buoyed along by reasonable desires and
such calmer dreams as locating the next mental
door that would open into another poem...And I wondered if I would alwaysThis volume represents an advance on his second book the end of his orbit. (I have not yet found the time to read his third book below: absence). In the second book, poems about parental displeasure and homosexual relations are addressed directly but in this collection, the framing devices I talked about enables him to deliberately blur distinctions between the real (Cyril Wong) and the persona (the poet who ponders at his own existence). The result is a distancing that layers the poems and renders them more fraught and complex and encourages, indeed demands, repeated reading.
be dreaming, and whether the greatest
Dream had yet to come, the one
we may all step out into, leaving
behind the seated houses of our bodies...
Review of Unmarked Treasure
by Sarah Loyola in The Business Times, Friday, Aug 27, 2004POETRY is about life, and Cyril Wong's poems in Unmarked Treasure are poems of his time in this present age. He uses his poetry in the form of letters by narratively listing his dreams and fantasies, but bases them on tangible relationships - writing about his family life: his mother, father, sister and his mate. But as the nature of poetry goes, Wong has turned his experiences, emotions and feelings into art through the use of his chosen language.
This language is contemporary and comes with surprises - with its special ways to startle, awaken or challenge the reader's mind. It's not easy to come up with original turns of phrases for common observations about life, and Wong's emotional experiences come through in his writing. Refreshingly, the poems are like outright statements. And reflecting this global, digitalised era, Wong explores his poetry and posits them in the Internet age, short messaging system and movies. His use of language and form has a mix of traditions, ethnicities and even gender but most clearly, it has universal influences. Unmarked Treasure sculpts a space for the reader to think, baffle over and be elated.
Review of Still Flight (23 Jun 2005, The Substation Dance Studio)
by Hong Xinyi in The Straits Times, Life! Thursday, Jun 30, 2005The ebb and flow of depression is a popular subject, it would appear, for female artists of a certain temperament.
British writer Virginia Woolf made the subject as light and sharp as a long-drawn breath of frosty winter's air in the 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway. American poet Sylvia Plath conjured up a thick plasma of debilitating self-loathing in 1963's The Bell Jar.
More recently, American writer Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote an autobiographical account of her struggles with depression in 1994's Prozac Nation, which wallowed in self-indulgence even as she seemed revolted by her own illness.
But while prose can probe the intricacies of a state of mind that reduces one to a state of moribund lethargy even as emotional turmoil churns away inside, depression presents difficulties when it becomes the subject of theatre.
When the disease is fleshed out on stage, the risk is that its psychological burdens become a litany of perpetual whining about being sad and blaming others for it.
But Still Flight, a one-woman monologue written by poet Cyril Wong and performed by Elizabeth de Roza, grazed the pitfalls of its subject matter while managing to remain relatively unscathed.
De Roza played a women struggling with depression. She first emerged from a swathe of white cloth, a visually strong image that evoked a cocoon harbouring some latent butterfly splendour as well as the formaldehyde stasis of a mummified corpse.
Thus was a victim of depression pictured as the living dead.
This woman knew not why she was so sad. She had issues with her controlling mother, a few relationship problems, and seemed encumbered by troubled memories that ensnared her with vivid tenacity.
But then don't we all?
De Roza was an engaging performer, and her training in a movement-based performance style gave her, in this first stab at a more dialogue-based work, a visceral intensity and honest vulnerability that remarkably never lapsed into faux-lyrical posturing.
Her character repeatedly told herself each morning that today, she would put on brightly coloured clothes, dab on perfume and "turn up my collar like two wings".
This mantra was repeated, at times feverishly, like incoherent dream mumbles, and at times fervently, like a prayer by the faithful.
An hour later, her character emerged, somewhat, from her depression's darkest throes - and if not a splendid butterfly, at least as a battle-scarred warrior.
Review of Still Flight (Chamber, The Arts House/27 Oct 2005)
by Hong Xinyi in The Straits Times, Life! Nov 01 2005
When it was first staged in June this year, Still Flight was a one-woman monologue in English written by poet Cyril Wong and performed by Elizabeth de Roza.
Trained in a style of movement-based performance, de Roza played an unnamed woman ensnared in the throes of depression by writhing and yearning in the stark space of The Substation’s Dance Studio.
In this revised staging, Wong’s script retains elements of the first version. Depression is still an important thread in the narrative, as is the character’s relationship with her mother.
But with performer Richard Chua playing the female protagonist (now named Siu Ngor) in a mix of Mandarin, Chinese dialects and English, the play is almost an entirely different creature.
For one thing, the juxtaposition of the sombre performance venue (the Old Parliament Chamber) and whimsical props like a stuffed toy dog give the production a kitschy aura of surreal humour.
Making full use of this unusual venue, Chua’s Siu Ngor began by seating herself next to Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew’s former seat, remarking on how his English speeches about government policies were impossible for her to understand.
This social aspect of the play did not pan out into a sustained development, but anecdotal asides like these did make Siu Ngor a much more fleshed-out character. She addressed the audience warmly as she related stories about her life, seeking to connect with them.
Depression was something this inherently optimistic, likeable character was uncomfortable with. She distanced herself from it by turning poignant moments into comedy, and never spiralled into morose depths like how de Roza’s character had.
Playwright Wong, clad in a skin-tight cheongsam, added to the dream-like atmosphere by playing what the programmed described as a “prop…a sort of distortional mirror or mental foil to the central character.”
Wong cooed siren songs as he strutted and pouted as a series of symbols – goddess of salvation; the chanteuse starring in Siu Ngor’s subconscious; and a mocker of her loneliness.
A projection of artist Donna Ong’s drawing of insect wings also dominated the set, a reminder of the pronounced arch of optimism striving to take flight in this play.
Like the light and shadow that formed the projection, this mellow meditation on solitude was more light than shadow.
Review of Like A Seed With Its Singular Purpose
by Kristina Tom in The Straits Times, Lifestyle - Read, 13 Aug 2006THE poems in this collection are like variations on a theme: always interrogating, always reaching back to that same singular seed of meaning.
Wong's signature themes appear throughout his fifth volume of poetry - family, homosexuality, eroticism and rejection - and some may find this repetitive. But I am of the school of thought that a poet may spend his entire life reworking the same poem - and that this is a laudable project.
Here, Wong offers an older, wearier voice than before; anger and rebellion have mellowed into melancholy, self-acceptance and a curiously calm examination of tragedy.
The poem, Practical Aim, for example, ends with the question, 'When all light finally / forsakes a room, do we take the time / to interrogate the dark, and to what end?'
He writes about deep personal loss and widescale tragedies such as the Boxing Day tsunami, but even then, the final question is not what is lost, but what can be gained.
As usual, he writes with a natural instinct for breath and the line break, and punctuates almost prosaic scenes with sudden moments of clarity.
Take, for example, the prose poem, Sculpture. Trying to pinpoint the exact moment at which he lost his father's love, he recounts how his father once asked him to pose for a photo in front of a sculpture 'like a lesser kind of statue'.
Wong is at his lyric best when exploring his own personal tragedy with painful acuity, but the most interesting parts of this collection are the longer persona poems in the sixth section of the book.
They are short stories in verse, exploring again the theme of loss but through a cast of characters - it is a departure from his usual stuff, and I would like to see where he goes with it.
Also intriguing is the final section of the book. If...Else, a long poem of conditional statements, originally published online, explores the ambiguity and missed opportunity contained in the word 'if'.
The third and fifth sections, however, are missteps for the poet.
Perhaps he is just not as good at the celebratory poem: The eroticism of the latter section comes across as a tad juvenile, as in the poem, the neighbour, in which the sex act alone - without enough emotional context - fails to carry the poem.
And the slightly bombastic diction (such as '... endless / branches of pure yearning, / eventuate in a vertiginous / forest of sound...') of the third section fetishises music in an unwarranted way reminiscent of Vikram Seth's An Equal Music.
That said, the collection as a whole is still a fine piece of work. His poems are indeed seeds: insistent, alive and burgeoning with a pulse that marks him as Singapore's foremost confessional poet.
Review of Like A Seed With Its Singular Purpose
by Elaine Meyers in IS Magazine, 1 Sep 2006The literary scene in Singapore is small. And one of the biggest voices in this small scene is poet Cyril Wong’s (Unmarked Treasure). This latest collection of Wong’s poetry, just published, is a continuation of the style he has become known for: Erudite, lyrical and very personal.
As he has done before, he tackles the subjects of forbidden love, parental rejection, secret emotions and the often painful truth. Openly gay, he writes about the challenges of living with his sexuality in a straight society and a conservative family with an acute honesty that is admirable. Wong’s bare boned scrutiny of gay life is exemplified in section eight of “Before the Afterlife” where he writes, “Where would we display the photos your sisters took of you...How about the one our friends took of us on the couch in each other’s arms, my head pressed against yours...What would my mother say if she came to visit, only to be assailed by such images...something else to splinter her delusion that you and I are nothing more than friends?”
When he writes about other subjects, like death in “Seventh Month”, the tsunami in “That Day” and a boy-girl relationship gone wrong in “The Gallery That Was Like A Warehouse,” he maintains the same blow by blow stripping down of the subject until its core is revealed. His language is often subtle and sparse, stiff in places even, and the raw emotions run through as an undercurrent more than an explosion. If you are not fully engaged with the poems, you might miss some of the tension beneath their surface. These are poems to take time to read and ponder over, as they grow on you the more you let them sink in.
Review of Like A Seed With Its Singular Purpose
by Gillian Bickley in South China Morning Post, 12 Nov 2006"If you can be this sad, you can also be this happy." There's no doubt of the intensity of the experiences Cyril Wong reflects in this, his fifth collection of poetry. The sadness is patent. But the happiness seems something hoped for, rather than achieved, except perhaps in the joy of expression, the joy of creating his work.
If the personality presented in each poem is one and the same, this book presents the only son of parents who wanted him to do well at school (a cane was used "to whip my school grades into shape"), and who also wanted him to have children within a happy, Christian marriage. His father ceased talking to him 20 years ago, when he learnt more than he was ready to learn about his son's private life. Wong became alienated from his mother, because her hopes and expectations for his life jarred with his own desires. This work shows the pain of rejection, hope for acceptance, and the desire for a different version of happy love and domesticity.
Wong lives life on the three levels of body, mind and spirit. Simple actions such as cutting toenails or trimming sideburns lead him to consider other types of loss: the loss of loved ones and the personal dissolution that occurs at death. He reacts deeply to cultural manifestations and events broadcast through the international media. Heat responds to an exhibition about the Japanese occupation of Singapore during the second world war. That day is a moving narrative of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.
Personalities of high and popular world cultures appear: Baudelaire, Simone Weil, Maria Callas, Meryl Streep. Chinese and Indian religion, dance and music are presented with inward understanding. In Why I sing, Wong - an admired counter-tenor - describes his feeling that singing creates, "enlightenment - respite,/ more like, even mercy - " and his experience that singer and listeners meet, "So far from what we are/ we find ourselves again."
His mind is full of questions, which it seems he can never "turn off / like the lights in a living room". Kissing Pope John Paul II's ring, as a boy, his mind urged the question, "What about us?" Later, when he watched the news about this Pope's death, saw the pain in his eyes through his broadcast image, his question changed to, "What about you?"
In these poems, the expressions of rebellion against a seemingly pre-ordained world order resemble those of the English romantic poets William Blake and A.C. Swinburne.
The book title is taken from the poem, Walls, loss of light, which interrogates the Creator about his purpose in creating man. The poet suggests that the Creator's "singular purpose" was simply to create. Compared with such a work of creation, none of created man's achievements can be considered a success.
Wong's own creative and personal ambitions are expressed movingly and terribly in the inverted, unjustified, self-doubting, final statement of the book: "If my self is a shadow, at least I made a dent in the light." His work appears here as blank verse, free verse, poetic prose, a dramatic playlet and a series of poignant propositions.
Review of Excess Baggage & Claim
by Ng Hui Hsien in IS Magazine, 9 Mar 2007A collaboration between Aussie actor-poet Terry Jaensch and local poet Cyril Wong, Excess Baggage & Claim combines the richness of poetry with the accessibility of narrative, providing glimpses into the experiences of two gay men. Jaensch's writing reveals the thoughts of an optimistic Australian tourist in Singapore, and is often imbued with metaphors, delving into everyday places and activities, from Yangtze to haggling at Clarke Quay, karaoke rooms to a simple phone call, effectively elevating the ordinary to the significant. Wong, on the other hand, dives into the psyche of a local guy who was abused by his father as a child and his subsequent dealings with gay love and sex. He moves the reader precisely because his writing is so simple and honest. He speaks of feelings that everyone can relate to - the anguish of being stood up or the loneliness that creeps in at times. Both characters meet eventually, agreeing to the omnipresence of shopping malls in the country. But if you're not into poetry, you won't be a convert after reading Excess Baggage & Claim. Though Wong's tender words may keep the uninitiated flipping, many might find Jaensch's writing a little too abstract. But the book, best read late at night, is a good choice if you're looking for poignant, as well as juicy, erotic passages that evoke your past loves.
Review of Excess Baggage & Claim
by June Cheong in The Sunday Times, 1 Apr 2007Like fugitives fleeing an unforgiving city, poets Cyril Wong and Terry Jaensch throw a long, lingering look at the site of their banishment, proffering love letters tinged with anger and incomprehension.
The result is Excess Baggage & Claim, a slim book which compiles the poets’ work and splits the 35 poems neatly into two sections titled Excess Baggage and & Claim.
Their styles are vastly different – Jaensch is lyrical and metaphorical, Wong pensive and conversational. And Wong’s latter half of the book hardly engaged with or acknowledges Jaensch’s earlier poems.
But the book does work.
Jaensch, who is Australian, traverses Singapore’s physical landscapes and is fascinated by fixtures of daily life here, such as foreign workers gathering at Farrer Park or the country’s obsession with karaoke.
For example, in Karaoke Booth 2, the gay poet strings the reader along on a journey of sexual frustration and ends up in an addled state of political apathy, concluding that “this country is like one endless mall”.
In contrast, Wong’s poems approach solipsism the outside world a mere springboard for him to meditate on memories. His simple, direct style reads like yet another angst-ridden blog confession. But his insidious, sleight-of-hand revelations of the poems’ protagonist’s dark secrets kept the reader hooked.
Review of Excess Baggage & Claim
by Jaya Savige in The Australian, 3 Oct 2007If this rate of cultural cross-pollination keeps up, the haiku may replace the bush ballad as Australia's preferred mode of poetic expression.
...published by Transit Lounge, Excess Baggage and Claim, co-authored by Melbourne-based Terry Jaensch and Singaporean poet Cyril Wong, presents the reader with a very different set of challenges, the nature of which makes this volume one of the most unnerving reads of recent years.
The collection, in two parts by Jaensch and Wong respectively, is essentially a no-holds-barred paean to the vicissitudes of love and longing, set against a backdrop of seedy karaoke bars, promiscuity and coruscating self-analysis. It is the result of a lengthy correspondence that eventually saw Jaensch travel to Singapore on an Asialink residency.
Jaensch introduces one of the volume's central themes, the protean nature of individual identity, in Leaf the Size of My Torso:
I approach myself from a variety
of angles
I delete
several spontaneous selves cast in bad light.
My task now is to cultivate one authentic self
from a series of predictabilities.
Like Hardacre's, Jaensch's voice is the locus for a collision between East and West and high and low culture, evident from the outset in his choice of epigraphs. The first, from the father of conservative politics, Edmund Burke -- "For only that which thwarts our will can be the cause of a grand and commanding conception" -- alludes to the baggage of the title; the second, a lyric from pop diva Beyonce -- "I don't think you're ready for this jelly" -- sets the work against the backdrop of the nightclub scene in the first years of the new millennium, and simultaneously throws down the gauntlet to readers who might be discomfited by some of the collection's more confronting subject matter.
Jaensch can be subtle about his sexuality when he wants to be: "Chinatown prepares for the new year, roosters line the streets" (from Karaoke -- Yangtze). At other times, he is less so: "To keep my cock limp I recite poetry/This country is like one/endless mall, beat, I tell the thirty-something/pole as he goes down on an inconsistency" (from Karaoke Booth 2).
But it is with Wong's contribution that the collection takes on a haunting tone. From the outset, the spectre of childhood sexual abuse looms large. The poem Don't Move -- "My father climbing/over me./How many boys would/know what that's like?" -- opens the suite, and each successive piece is testament to the destructive effects: "Is this/damage I must unstitch for the rest of my life?"
This is strong stuff, and while Wong's delivery is more direct than poems on the same subject by Sharon Olds, his unflinching, flinty voice is reminiscent of that North American writer. The poems have a devastating cumulative effect. Midway through the suite, the speaker observes:
A whore's capacity to seduce
is like a eunuch's influence in the Ming dynasty,
that strategic diversion from prejudice,
which shields them, even as they remain tethered,
love everywhere beyond the widening circles of their lives.
The pitch-perfect identification with the figure of the whore and that of the eunuch suggests the anguish at the heart of this book. Its subject matter, dark and vital, adds yet another thread to the rich cross-cultural conversation canvassed here.
Review of Tilting Our Plates To Catch The Light
by Qian Leung in IS Magazine, 14 Dec 2007Cyril Wong's latest collection of poetry tells of a society where you expect to be punished and rejected if you don't conform to the norm. Wong's writing takes you out of your armchair and into his apartment, where he opens up his heart and life for all the world to see. His words go full-throttle and work themselves into a ruckus in "The men we loved, the men we had, the men we wanted" and slows to a tranquilizing effect in "Hate to see you die alone". Elsewhere in this collection, death looms, lurking just around the corner. And yet Wong writes of a love that knows no boundaries and transcends time and death...the kind of love perhaps we all secretly long for. Those with a melancholic temperament will surely be enamoured.
Review of Tilting Our Plates To Catch The Light
by Stephanie Yap in The Sunday Times, 13 Jan 2008If you were wondering: Yes, the plates in the title are the kind you eat from. The image is taken from one of the poems in this collection, in which a couple, both stricken with Aids, carry on with their daily lives, including the washing of dishes, "without grief, but also / without hope."
As for the collection, it serves up three narrative strands which, in their apparent unconnectedness, might lead one to wonder at first glance if the poet is biting off more than he can chew.
One describes the lives of the Hindu god Shiva and his lover Mohini, the female incarnation of the god Vishnu. Another draws from the poet's classical music background, with love poems which bear Italian musical terms as titles. A third is told from the perspective of a couple coping with illness and impending death.
But in what is his most polished collection thus far, Wong manages to interweave and merge the three strands into a luminous symphony, best appreciated when read straight through in one sitting, as per concert hall conditions.
His lyricism is in full bloom here, evoking that dreamy, Wong Kar Wai feel previous reviewers have remarked upon.
Take his description of a couple dealing with death: "But when they catch him asleep, they touch as / quietly as they can, forgetting, for a moment, / that he is lying there between them, / dreaming of freezing deserts and majestic ruins / overrun with weeds and mute with memory."
But it's not all exquisite imagery and profundity. What buoys this collection is its sense of loving irreverence, like the gentle humour with which the poet mixes the sacred and the quotidian: "Shiva / enters the garden / like a man / coming home / to his wife, loosening / the tie of his divinity, / shaking the clouds / from his feet".
Or, in a tribute to booty-shaking goddesses both immortal and mortal: "I was Mohini, vibrating / madly, a wilder / Shakira."
As the collection explores emotional attachments and loss, the notion of empty instruments of nourishment as a means to reflect more intangible warmth takes on poignancy.
But, ultimately, this poetry collection burns strongly with its own inherent energy, celebrating love in a generous, timeless way: "Even with one of us gone, would not the mind / of the other reveal its universe, its constellation / of memories like a field of flickering candles / the same face at the centre of every flame?"
