SINGAPORE – In the biggest effort yet to promote Singaporean literature, more than 100 poem excerpts have been pasted on trains and stations on the SMRT-operated North-South, East-West and Circle lines.
Here are six excerpts to get you started in creating your own poetry canon in Singapore.
1. “I want to taste the petai sharp” by Edwin Thumboo
“I want to taste the petai sharp / Straight from the curling pod / To hold the village in my mouth.” – Renovation (1993)
Edwin Thumboo’s best-known work Ulysses By The Merlion is shunned for a less laudatory version of Singapore’s evolution. Celebration turns to nostalgia, for a time when encounters with nature were more vivid and the senses came alive more easily. You can almost enjoy the stench of the Southeast Asian bean, containing entire villages that had already been displaced by anonymous high-rise housing in the 1990s.
2. “I confuse marmalade with kaya” by Hamid Roslan
“Sometimes it happens between aisles/in Waitrose. I confuse marmalade with/kaya, think of toast, mouth ‘nonsense’ –/but not alamak.” – Untitled (2019)
Another poem that approaches nostalgia through food, but this time about geography rather than time. Hamid Roslan turns shopping in the British supermarket Waitrose into a meditation on the diaspora experience: a gradual process of language loss, starting with the most fundamental blocks: food and curse words.
This poem is from his parsetreeforestfire (2019), a ‘bilingual’ poetry collection with Singlish on one side and English on the other. The attention to language falls within a movement to reclaim colloquialism, a conscious dismantling of colonial hierarchies.
3. “You Have No Other” by Simon Tay
“If you can’t learn to love/(yes to love) this city/you have no other.” – Singapore Night Song (1985)
Tay’s pragmatic appeal: You only have the city you were born in to call home, and you have to love it to be happy. His considered patriotism speaks to an existential sense of belonging for many, even though this may be at odds in today’s globalized world, where many have uprooted their lives to seek new fortunes in adopted families.
4. “Drink all European wine dry” by Wang Mun Kiat
“From below the equator/I extend a straw/To drink dry all the European wine/physics protests, ridiculous! far-fetched!/lit says,/bottoms up!” – Drunk (2023)
Wang Mun Kiat is a Singaporean-Chinese poet, whose simple poems in his second collection Short Tongue (2023) belie deep reservoirs of irony, humor and social commentary. His declamation here is exactly the kind you make when you’re drunk, but it also captures an artist’s zest for life. Translated from Chinese by poet Joshua Ip.
5. “A Rainbow Layed Itself Down” by Mohamed Latiff Mohamed
“A rainbow has laid itself down/at the bottom of the pool/which is bright and clear/enclosure in the ocean/half of its chest/is caressed by the twilight/while the rest/are toys/for angels at the edge of paradise.” – Pelangi (Rainbow, 1980)
Cultural Medallion Recipient Mohamed Latiff Mohamed’s rainbow is a smooth bridge between heaven and earth imbued with a touch of divinity. A three-time winner of the Singapore Literature Prize, he is better known as a ‘protest poet’, highly critical of power groups and a champion for the poor. Translated by Alfian Sa’at.
6. “The back is curved like a rainbow arc” by KTM Iqbal
“Weighed by the hard experiences of life/The back is bent/Like the arc of a rainbow/Yet that spine tells a story – /About a life lived/with resilience and fortitude” – Gray Light (2016)
The same rainbow here evokes the difficult life of a worker, with the parable of the Tamil poet KTM Iqbal as unusual as it is powerful.
A prolific Tamil poet and essayist, Iqbal is also a Cultural Medallion recipient.