Singaporean poetry of deep memory

I met Robert Yeo of Singapore at the International Writing Program in Iowa City in 1978. We shared a unit at the Mayflower Apartments for almost a month, until we were joined by our respective partners. As English-language poets, we exchanged views on lyricism and imagery, metaphors and thematic insights we had learned at home, while reading and adopting what we could of the finesse of Western literature.

Now, nearly five decades later, we still write poetry as octogenarians, and publish collections that have evolved to keep pace with our continuing maturity.

Robert’s latest poetry book, his sixth, is titled A Colette Sequence and other poems, published late last year by Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd. The first of its four sections recalls a lady he met six decades ago. No, she is not the famous Colette, the French author and woman of letters, also a mime, actress, and journalist who lived from 1873 to 1954. That Colette is best known for her 1944 novella Gigi, which spawned the 1958 film and the 1973 stage production of the same name.

The Colette in Yeo’s distant realm of nostalgia is Colette Veschambre, also a French girl, whom he met in his youth when he took his MA in Comparative Education in London. In his prose “Introduction to A Colette Sequence,” Robert describes how their deep friendship developed in a span of seasons that started in 1966 as they arranged a series of rendezvous and exchanged flirtatious postcards when they were far apart. A Parisian, she worked as an au pair in Nottingham where they met at a dance party. “I thought she was gorgeous with a slim figure, almond-shaped face and brown tresses. … Colette spoke excellent English with a delicious French accent and danced beautifully.” The infatuation was fated.

“In Nottingham, I spent an absolutely beautiful Spring day with her, visiting many different tourist places with her, among them Nottingham University where I took a photo of her in my Agfa camera. In the summer of the same year, I visited her in Paris. When I was in London, she was up in the Midlands. Now, she was in Paris. That was when I realized my passion for her had to be platonic. As a student I did not have enough money to visit her as often as I would love to.

“These pieces, sentimental, song-like, lighter than my poems, record an unrequited longing for a beautiful girl. Looking back, every person should have a memory of loss although he may not necessarily appreciate truly what he has lost.

“I was twenty-seven then but felt that I was an adolescent seventeen.”

Here’s Robert’s final stanza of “Sonnet”: “An impish laugh on a heartshaped face/ Accords with the studied grace of your stroll/ Somehow. In you, my desires coalesce,/ Such as they do on dreams I used to fold/ With toffee wrappers, dreams that grew from a glance./ I muse again indulgently—but are you real?”

The new collection also includes thematic pieces evoking his ancestry as a Baba (a Peranakan man) as well as excerpts of his librettos for operas he had written. These other sections are: “New Poems,” “Arias and Choruses from Fences, an opera,” and “Homage—A Small Town Romance.”

The Baba heritage poems were first collected in The Best of Robert Yeo, published in 2012. He has also written political plays that have been performed, with the best-known collected in The Singapore Trilogy, in 2011. Additionally, he has written librettos for two operas, Fences and Kannagi. Both were performed in Singapore, where he has been awarded the Public Service Medal. An international distinction is the SEAWrite Award from Thai royalty for lifetime achievement.

From a libretto is an excerpt from “The couple that rides the trough”:

 “STEVEN & NORA—The couple that rides the trough/ Thrives in the cusp/ Of what’s doubly good./ A ship that survives the huff/ Shows the maker knows his wood./ Thank you mothers/ For putting the young/ Before the old./ You must know, fathers,/ The day you sent them away,/ Boys became men, girls women./ The past is a hearse/ The future is not on hold./ After the passage/ Of Steven and Nora/ Nora and Steven/ What is the message?// Whatever is furrowed in seas/ Will be tangy with brine./ Stretched sails unfurl with ease./ Stretched sails unfurl with ease.”

And the final two quatrains of the last section, a melange of Hokkien and other local languages in Malaysia and Singapore—in tribute to his Baba heritage—requires numbered Endnotes as a glossary.

“Oh Baba Tan/ You get more gatal (Itchy)/ By the minute./ They are not halal (Halal is an Arabic word meaning lawful or permitted…)—// Halal, I don’t know—/ Your legs, I mean./ Aliyah (Exclamation of exasperation) Abang Tan (Literally older brother [Malay] but a polite reference to a male lover.)”

I will not stress that Robert Yeo, like myself, is an octogenarian poet. We are poets aging and yet maturing in agile avoidance of dementia, as we uncover fond memories of what made us poets in the first place.

The kinship between Singaporean and Philippine poets stays just as strong. I understand that yet another collaboration in in the works for a poetry anthology to appear this year. I expect it to include the works of lifetime friends such as Alvin Pang, Felix Cheong, Aaron Lee, and maybe the more senior Kirpal Singh and Robert Yeo. Among the Filipino poets still based in Singapore, and contributing significantly to the literary kinship, are Eric Tinsay Valles, Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, and Miguela Bravo-Dutt. Deservedly a co-editor for the upcoming anthology is our homegrown stalwart Joel Toledo.