The Singer and Other Poems
Kim Cheng Boey
Cordite Books: 2022
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Many a good poem gets its ‘cadences and lapping folds’ from memory drawn up, drawn out, to focus on the here and now. In Kim Cheng Boey’s latest collection, his muse is memory, his tropes are topography—though this won’t come as news to his well-established readership. He’s still a nomad in ‘the migrant’s no-man’s-land’ where ‘memory’s evening raga … is finding its groove again’. Most of the poems are grounded in recollection and reflection, when ‘dialling up the past’ is projected on to a triptych of sequences where a ‘grammar of time’ is conjugated, and not as a paradigm but through a dynamic of image and allusion, elegy and lyric, narrative and anecdote, epiphany and aporia, with the ironies such as ‘exiles in the home’ and in the voices ‘exiled from our mother tongue’. That dialling isn’t merely for some nostalgic retrofit.

• Tags: Issue 28, Kim Cheng Boey, Michael Freeman, Singapore