“For me, Robert Yeo’s Contribution to local poetry will always be more than the sum of his poems.
Like Ee Tiang Hong, who is perhaps more polished, Yeo has given to poetry a rich, prosaic definition- one that says a good poem must, more than anything else, communicate and tell.
I can best justify such a grand attribution on very personal grounds. Yeo’s poems, which I found (and still find) refreshingly down-to-earth, changed my attitude towards poetry- and by extension, literature- when I was in secondary school”
-Chua Chong Jin, Straits Times 6 December 1989
“The play and the dialogue is strong and forceful. Scene three stands out most in the play when in a face to face confrontation, there is heated dialogue between Fernandez and Chye over ideologies, PAP, and parliamentary democracy. Though very much political, the theme is underplayed and overshadowed by other themes. The careful blend is artistic and lends itself to non commitment”
-Jagjit Nagpal, Straits Times 16 November 1980
“Robert Yeo’s volumes of poetry are not so much collections of artefacts as chronicles of a life. His poems are personal poems, reflections on observed reality. They chronicle the developments of an individual consciousness while at the same time they chronicle the development of Singapore. The parallelism of the poet and the city is unforced but recurrent.”
-Michael Wilding
Q: Would you regard yourself as a controversial writer?
A: “Controversial” is a relative word. One could be controversial because a reviewer objected to my depiction of women, as was the case with Holden Heng in 1989, and I rebutted and there was a series of exchanges. Or one is controversial for addressing themes the government was not ready to see addressed, such as opposition politics in the case of my play One Year Back Home in 1980. So yes, in these two examples, I am controversial. I see the term “controversial” as being more meaningful if it means that the writer probes new areas of expression which extends the boundaries and adds what can be said about them. In the case of Gopal Baratham, Singapore politics in A candle or the sun or sex in Sayang. (Mind you there’s a lot more than sex in Sayang.) Just as there is more to Changi than overt scenes of political interrogation in prison.
(Ban Kah Choon Talks to Robert Yeo- 2000)
