Waves Rising: Collected Works of Ho Poh Fun & Responsesy
Edited by Ann Ang
Pagesetters: 2024
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What does anyone get out of resurrecting the dead? I ask myself this whenever out-of-print literary work returns to circulation. Waves Rising: Collected Works of Ho Poh Fun & Responses, coming six years after the poet’s passing, is the latest result of such recovery efforts. Ho Poh Fun was the first published poet I knew personally; she was teacher-in-charge of my junior college’s Literary Wing, which I’d joined. This was the mid-2000s; I was seventeen. In hindsight, those may have been some of the worst years of my life. My parents’ marriage was falling apart, though I didn’t fully understand it at the time. Over at LitWing (as we called it), Miss Ho constantly compared us unfavourably with the students at her former, more prestigious, college. I wasn’t doing well in class. I wrote poetry compulsively and felt I had nothing to offer anyone…

When speaking of the dead, why do I end up talking about myself?

Waves Rising is a hybrid of collected works and festschrift, the latter traditionally honouring a retired professor by gathering essays from colleagues and students. Ho’s body of work represented here comprises Katong and Other Poems (her first and only book), six previously uncollected short stories and three previously uncollected poems. Editor Ann Ang’s wide-ranging introduction briefly describes the “responses” (mainly essays, some poetry, no fiction) but doesn’t go into why this hybrid form was chosen, how responses were selected or the thinking behind sequencing in general. The book intersperses the responses with Ho’s work and puts Katong in between two loose groups of three short stories each. There are tensions between the instincts to preserve or put into conversation, to highlight the writing or remember the writer. These are tensions I clearly struggle with too.

• Tags: Ho Poh Fun, Issue 40, Singapore, Tse Hao Guang