Yeo: Snippets of Reviews and Interview

“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)

AS: What his friends say about him

This is a video Alfian's close friends (which include prominent in the Singapore arts scene such as Roystan Tan) made him a wonderful video for his 30th birthday.

I think it's better than any interview he ever gave just because we really get to see how he really is minus the politics of his works - a really genuine and brave human being.

Watch!

A review: Iambus (1994)

Iambus was Toh hsien Min’s very first published collection of poetry. This was a little apparent to me in his work, especially because I had read his collections backwards.

His play on style was a lot simpler and most poems, shorter. It felt like a poet’s scribbles at the start of an idea, in comparison to his more polished works in later collections.

Again, the variety in subject points in his poetry made it seem as if Hsien Min had carved inspiration from just about any object or scenery. A recurring theme in this collection however, was nature. The theme was shared in poems such as ‘In the Park’, ‘Weed-Killer’ and ‘Bukit Timah and Hindhede’ where imagery of nature was profusely used.

This led me to insinuate a gentler tone throughout his poetry. Whereas in ‘Means to An End’, his latest collection, I sensed a more assertive and opinionated tone. Frankly, I liked ‘Iambus’ the least and ‘Means to An End’ the most. His opinions and personal perspective weaved in his poetry encouraged a lot more thought by the reader which made reading more engaging.

Min, T. H. (1994). Iambus. UniPress

On Suchen Christine Lim...

During lecture this week, Suchen Christine Lim was invited to be our guest speaker/writer for the day.

Having met her before during my JC days, I didn't expect much since I thought that it will probably be about the same thing.

However, the woman writer, though petite, struck me as a very passionate woman about her work. She holds a love towards her writing and her characters, which is evident in both times that I've heard her speak. The way she read parts of her novel were energetic and full of life.

There was something she said during that lecture that really caused me to wonder. That is, when she kept urging us to read the novel to enjoy it rather than as a literary text.

This made me wonder if sometimes, we tend to over-analyse certain subjects and themes in novels, in literature itself. With the aim to write a good report, we debunk every single sentence to find something beyond what the normal reader would see. Through that process, we may actually get a deeper sense of the novel and how it relates to the world that the author sees, but does that diminish the simple enjoyment of just reading a book as it is? Is that really the author's intention?

I would always remember during a lecture in JC, when one of my classmates asked Lim why the title 'Fistful of Colours' and she replied that there wasn't any particular reason for that, it was just a nice name that her friend had suggested to her. We were all taken aback as we had spent many lessons discussing about that, trying to figure out what went through the author's mind.

But that said, there is always a little sense of accomplishment after every attempt to discover a theme and seeing the grades go up with each try. I guess it's a matter of balancing... and yes, I still love Lit.