Xin Wei THOW

Critical Introduction to Leonard Ng for poetry.sg

Excerpt:

At current writing, Leonard Ng has two print volumes of poetry, This Mortal World, and Changes and Chances, both published by Ethos books. He also has several translations of Mandarin classics available on his website: this might explain how some of his English poems achieve a certain charming sensibility in tone and treatment of subject matter that suggest they were translations of a Chinese original.

Ng is also the author of several essays and review on QLRS and one of these, The Enchanted Island (2006), is particularly helpful when reading his own poetry. Here, takes as a starting point Cyril Wong’s criticism of more recent Singaporean poetry as yuppie and shallow, giving “this sense that people have nothing to say”.

Ng accepts the point but decides to be “a little kinder” by explaining it: he suggests that the fluency required to write poetry in English is, for social, financial and educational reasons, constrained to Singaporeans of a certain class “almost predestined” to upper middle class concerns and social mores. And while disenchantment with this roundabout has driven several poets abroad (Ng lists Goh Poh Seng, Boey Kim Cheng and Eddie Tay), he suggests, as another exit, a turn towards the “uncanny,” the “supernatural” and the “otherness” within the country to which poets “far too often [ . . . ] simply aren’t paying attention”: