The Poetry of Personal Revelation: Reviewing Cyril Wong’s "Unmarked Treasure"

By Leonard Jeyam, Southeast Asian Review of English, No. 47 April 2006/07, p. 96-99

If both Koh Beng Liang’s and Alvin Pang’s last volumes of verse point outwards to a civilised, urbane Singapore, most of Cyril Wong’s poetry prefers to dwell inwards, seeking inner truths about external realities. His is rarely a public poetry that yearns to be consumed by wit, artifice, and social integrity; instead the perceptions of his inner self often take centre stage.

Instead of arriving at the artifice of social, universal truths, Wong prefers to concentrate on self-extenuation and, not unlike his earlier verse, probe the fissurings of the self few are brave enough to speak about. In “Flight Dreams”, for example, the persona of the poem realises that the dreams of his future cannot be realised anymore as a result of his mind’s young mind discovering the undercurrents of sensuality, sexual desire, which actually help him find release from the dreams of “entrapment” his parents had for him when he was younger.

Then I discovered a part of me that rose up
in a hundred bedrooms that eventually
looked like each other, when a stranger’s
hand or mouth would push me back into myself,
only to suck me back out again by the shock
of the body’s capacity for desire
like a black wave rolling back and forth,
back and forth right through me.

But such sexual release, the persona discovers later, is only akin to an astronaut cast adrift in space, “into a starry nothingness”. The perceptual space his words evoke often concord with just the right tone and image. His personal, inner world also discovers just the right public sphere to cohere in, although Wong can be accused of not always wearing his emotions subtly. In “Notes to a Suicide”, the persona explores the alienable perspectives of such an act but wallows in gladness thinking about the victory which his newspaper obituary would eventually engender over his parents:

Imagine it: my face on the last page
of the Straits Times. Passport-size
no less. A grin on my face, for sure,
mother having chosen it herself.
But do not mistake that grin for irony.
Among veterans, I will be the exception,
the prodigious newcomer for arriving
before my time. And so imagine it:
that finishing tape at the end of the race
tightening to an arc across my chest.

Reading Unmarked Treasure is to invite into our minds the clash of intimate and chaotic pieces of the fragmentary nature of human experience. Wong’s verse works on different levels of metaphoric revelation and relevance, although it is all too easy to pigeon-hole such verse as being merely confessional. His fondness for the tropes of the postmodern snapshot and visual stimulae is certainly evident in all his writing. This often translates sensitively into a penchant for enacting meaning simply by way of imagery:

Uncertainty exploded and pushed
out against the walls around my voice, but
my love only saw my easy confidence, my self-
deprecating humour, while my min was opening
a window from the back of my head to gaze
out into some horizon, where a vague silhouette
of myself was walking further and further away.

This plane of revelation, amalgamating personal grief and lyrical suggestiveness, is something uncommon to anything being written in Singapore at the moment. Perhaps only Alfian Sa’at’s outstanding second book of verse, A History of Amnesia (2001), could compare in terms of autobiographical insight although his private and public juxtapositions have a different strategy in mind. That is to say that Alfian’s later poetry prefers to dwell on the social context of being Singaporean, wherein identities of nation, state and the individual are explored. Wong’s poetry, on the other hand, is a totally private universe full of delicate perception written in a deceptively simple, revealing style. Vision arrives out of solitude, out of the very dreariness of living. He finds emotional centres, which often arrive with an achingly beautiful choice of metaphor. He remembers an old home in a litany of images in “First Home”:

I am a child again standing at this balcony,
succumbing to a solitude I knew then how to love,
a row of potted plants humming to a day’s luminosity,
while those clouds are the vast sails of ships
billowing with the future’s
unstoppable gale.

Then when the “unstoppable gale” of the future actually arrives, the wonderment of fondly remembered things begins to be suffused with the ideas and feelings of adult family conflict and sexual insecurity. These images often evoke a sense of loneliness and grief, two things not always easy to replicate in verse especially when faced with the subtleties of image and language. In his tribute piece to the Thai artist Araya Rasdjaumrearnsook, Wong discovers again that in images of defeat/loss he is able to learn a new language of acceptance and transcendence, which subsumes the possibility of genuine selflessness. Then nothingness he felt as a young child as a result of the emotional estrangement between he and his father is dealt with first:

This was before my father stopped talking
to me, Araya, before I realised that love
meant I would always be the one
giving more. And I learnt how disappointment
too could swell to something as deafening
as a plane outside my window, that blizzard
of sound rocking the insides of my ears
and chest so hard and often that how
could I not help but begin to love that too.

Ironically, the poet learns from the Thai’s artist’s fondness for reading and singing to corpses on film so as to, we are told, facilitate the “communication between her and her memories of loss”. In his long sequence, Wong too wishes his living father dead, which he says is similar to the years “spent / mourning his absence”. His father, we can garner from numerous poems in the volume, despised his son’s less than manly physicalities and kept an emotional distance from the rest of the family too. Wishing him dead would help the poet-self to compose his own meaning or “own stories” on and around the metaphorical dead body. The poet could then begin to understand the language of forgiveness:

sing bittersweet love songs
from a throat already raw from rage
and crying to his sealed eyes
and mouth, not fearing if he would
awaken to scorn my womanly voice.
But for this, I would require him
to be really dead, Araya, as only then
could I truly begin to forgive him.

Cyril Wong is the custodian of a strand of Singaporean poetry that is rare indeed. One would have thought that being confessional in a hugely autobiographical age is commonplace enough. Yet, we forget that to be Asian still means keeping one’s sentimentality in check, which in turns renders sensitive and sentimental outpourings unnecessary. It has been suggested by one Singaporean critic that such biographical musings could also be viewed as a form of social protest from within the authoritarian island-state. While this could be wholly possible, I feel that we should not miss the essence of what Wong’s poetry is all about. His is an art that works simply from a personal plane, and from within such a plane we have some of the most sensitive, articulate probings into the nature of one’s self that have never been seen before in all of contemporary Singaporean verse.