Review of "The End Of His Orbit"

By John Phillips, The Arts Magazine, 2002

Cyril Wong, like many young Singapore poets, demonstrates confidence and delicacy in that overwhelmingly dominant poetic mode - the lyric. The sheer range of prosodic skills he employs to evoke uncanny, sensual, sometimes brutally open emotional vignettes between his various personae and their addresses is impressive. Neatly organised sections contain apostrophes, odes and elegies to parents, lovers, friends and teachers, to the poet himself, to parts of his body and his name, and in a final section he hands the lyric first person over to historical and mythical personae, a brief series of witty alternative perspectives.

Yet impressive prosody alone would not be sufficient reason to celebrate this new collection, which emerges in a field crowded with competent examples of the genre. The lyric mode in the context of a stark consumerism (Rajeev Patke has called it "the somnambulism of the lyric") too often amounts to little more than well turned similes or startling metaphors in the descriptive service of emotions often found better evoked in popular music and soap opera ("he descended/Into the couch like a coffin/Into a hole in the ground").

Wong's poems surpass the blandness of the contemporary lyric by interrogating the rules of naming and address (the titles are often dedications or puzzled reflections on names). Thus the poems tread figuratively between a fear of confinement and a cautiously candid openness.