Boey kim cheng biography of rory

Festival Festival archive Events Bombing of Poems C. For schools For organisations and companies Workshops in leisure time Upcoming workshops Spraakzaam Rotterdam. About Us. Contact us. By the time his novel was published, Boey had returned to Singapore, and our meetings had become few and far between. Our meetings in person, that is. We continued to commune on the page, and my poems have, variously over the years, responded to his poems, in direct and indirect ways.

He takes a fist-sized ball and starts his noodle magic, stretching the bands, the sleight-of-hand plain for you to see, weaving a stave of floury silent music. You stand islanded from the passage of bodies and cars, the art of la mian reeling you in to a music deep beneath the murmur of traffic, beyond the fusillade of a siren down the street.

Between here. Now you watch the handful of hand-pulled noodles dunked in a boiling pot, then scooped with a mesh ladle onto a waiting bowl of broth. You sit before it, enveloped in steam, chopsticks ready to seize the ends or beginnings, and start pulling them in. In the tepid winter sun we walk briskly to catch a bus to Chinatown, my footfall ten years behind yours.

We stand on a corner under tin awnings, peppered by spray, watching this familiar rain. The drains have had their fill. Unlike children, we skip puddles and try not to splash.

Boey kim cheng biography of rory: Martin Duwell summarises its contents

We are still strangers: under my small umbrella you are half-drenched. An old song surfaces: Wa neng nang…. Inside, surrounded by smells of home, my tongue loosens then slips into the cadences of Singlish. I tell you of the afternoons my grandmother fried sambal belachan in the house. You wrinkle your nose: these memories need neither grammar.

But where you go I cannot follow—I lost the language years ago. Outside, the rain has stopped. We drink our tea and split the bill. My face shrinks to a small rectangle in the right-hand corner as Boey joins me online. I am startled by how much grey is in his hair — in my mind, I think of Boey at age 40, the age he was when we first met in person.

Then I see my own visage, also at age 40, and remember that time passes, even as we attempt to hold on to it in our poems and on the page. I ask Boey about the genesis of his life as a poet. I started out very much alone, and it was mostly through instinct, and through browsing the shelves in libraries, that I found my mentors and my influences.

I think you invent your exemplars, you invent your influences, you invent your ancestors, as you start out.

Boey kim cheng biography of rory: Boey Kim Cheng, “Foreword” in Ars

That sense of discovery was very real, and that changed me irrevocably. They have stayed with me all these years. I ask Boey why he decided to write all those years ago, for not all readers necessarily become writers. Boey pauses.

Boey kim cheng biography of rory: The exegesis manuscript was given project

Part of me wants to keep it shrouded in mystery, as a superstition. There was definitely also the influence of the Irish poets Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon in my early work. I even learned German for a number of years so I could read Rilke properly. They have the means. They have it all so it will not hurt, so history is new again.

The piling will not stop. I ask Boey what his first poems were about. He talks about his time spent in the Singapore Armed Forces — every male citizen of the country has to undertake two-and-a-half years of compulsory military service — and how he viewed poetry as an act of transmutation of time, place, and events. And I felt the thrill of discovery — there was a sense of what poetry could do for me.

Writing is a way of opening up doors of perception within me, of surrendering myself to those moments of insight, of knowledge. The saint is afraid to move his hand, because the bird is nesting, and the saint forgets himself. And this is what happens to us poets, us writers, too. There are times when I am unable to distinguish Boey, the person, from Boey the poet, the writer, the scholar, the weary traveller.

Perhaps the plum will flourish on this soil, like the white plum in our yard, and transplanted. Boey's works are highly regarded by both the academic and writing communities in Singapore. Boey says that his poems about them are "attempts to memorialize them, to deal with their disappearance. With forgiveness. And love. You are afraid to lose them, the images, the very sense of who they are.

Boey's poems are on the A-level syllabus for English literature in Singapore. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. The native form of this personal name is Kim Cheng Boey. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Singapore-born Australian poet. Early life [ edit ]. Career and achievements [ edit ]. Works [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. National Library of Singapore.