Oneiros

by Cyril Wong

"Wong delivers heartbreaking and tender lines of poetry, as light as a dream's remembrance,
as hard-hitting as a dream's sudden flash of insight."

—Jenny Boully, author of The An Essay

"Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, God, the familial dead, Walter Benjamin, Anne Sexton
and the Road Runner all inhabit the same philosophical and poetic plane...the semiotic field
is flattened in a brave thunderclap of reduction, and images begin to drift towards the toroidal
opening of the wormhole some might call awakening, others might call death."

—W. B. Keckler, author of Sanskrit of the Body

"Cyril Wong excavates an archaeology of the self, departing into unpredictable dreamtime
where the gamut of emotions - anger, terror, and joy intermingle with the absurd, the funny,
the surreal, and the intensely personal."

—Mong-Lan, author of Tango, Poems & Art

Genres: Poetry, Love

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Cyril Wong is a two-time Singapore Literature Prize-winning poet and the recipient of the Singapore National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award for Literature. His books include poetry collections Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light (2007) and The Lover’s Inventory (2015), novels The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza (2013) and This Side of Heaven (2020), and fiction collection Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me (2014). He completed his doctoral degree in English Literature at the National University of Singapore in 2012. His works have been featured in the Norton anthology, Language for a New Century, in Chinese Erotic Poems by Everyman’s Library, and in magazines and journals around the world. His writings have been translated into Turkish, German, Italian, French, Portuguese and Japanese.

Reviews

[Kendrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oneiros is one of Cyril Wong’s last poetry collections with firstfruits publishing. Published in 2008 and then re-issued in 2018 alongside Like A Seed With Singular Purpose and The Lover’s Inventory (winner of the 2016 Singapore Literature Prize in Poetry), Oneiros marks an inflection point in Wong’s oeuvre with its experiment in book-length conceits. A collection that plays with dream narrative and logic, Wong’s free-verse poems dispense with titles, instead going through cycles of overt ‘dreaming’ and ‘waking’.

Sleep as a conceit allows for Wong’s poetry to be more elastic in its settings, as with the section “Untitled [Watching the National Day Parade on television]”. Wong’s speaker describes going to sleep and dreaming of the parade anyway – “sitting with Singaporeans on a floating stadium”, a nameless lover by his side. The nationalist spectacle however cuts out and the lover also disappears. A spotlight appears, revealing an older version of the speaker:

[…] “Hello!” I yelled. “What the hell?”
Cupping his small voice in his hands he replied,
“It’s you and I now! No one’s left to persecute us!
No one here that will leave us again!” “But this
is just a stupid dream!” I shouted back, cupping
my hands in the same way. The figure shrugged.
A quiet returned for an eternity. I looked at my hands
and saw how they aged. Solitude sunk in like
news of a terminal illness. But I was not sad, bitter
or resigned. As if on cue, the makers of this dream
injected fireworks into the night without a sound.
Perfectly alone, I gazed up at a flowering sky, raising
my hands to contain it in my arms. When I woke up,
I was astonished to find my arms dangling in the air.

Wong’s play with dream logic allows for utterances of the unconscious insecurity of the speaker (the fear of persecution for being gay), the co-mingling of private fears with public spectacle and narrative. Wong’s poetry is critically conceptualised as obsessed with death and love; this fragment of Wong’s extended poetic sequence neatly encapsulates these themes.

Amidst cycles of sleeping and waking, Wong surfaces past lovers and parental figures to interact with. These are familiar figures in Wong’s poetry, and Wong doesn’t make any particularly new breakthroughs on this front. What is interesting about Oneiros, however, are the sections that play with narrative. The section, “Untitled [I’m about to have a buffet]” is a delightful morsel of a scene where the speaker goes to a buffet in which no one eats. The surreal atmosphere of various characters rhapsodizing about how much they enjoyed the meal while ignoring a hungry man, only to eventually drive over him as they leave, is fascinating for its parable-like atmosphere. Retrospectively, it seems to forecast Wong’s future explorations with prose, especially his recent 2020 novella, This Side of Heaven.

In my reading, Oneiros tires of its conceit mid-way through. The proliferation of characters, scenes, and narrative jumps can be overwhelming. Nevertheless, I still find enough in this collection to enjoy. I particularly appreciate Wong’s mixing of local Singaporean references with global influences, ranging from Looney Tunes’ Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, the U.S. poet Anne Sexton, to cameos of Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Miss Marple. In Singapore’s literary scene, we often get hung up on what is “local writing”, as if we must all be devotees of Singapore’s local history and traditions, however limiting these categories may be. Of course, we grew up with Anglophone entertainment. They are part of our cultural milieu as much as our familial beliefs. If one looks into our unconscious, we’ll find both lurking within.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

picked this up without meaning to when i stopped by the central library earlier today and i actually finished the whole book before i even reached my stop. none of the individual poems are named so the short novel reads like a long epic poem. the opening poem is powerful, and the entire experience of reading this is quite remarkable -- it felt as if i was in a shapeless dreamscape, led from exhibit A to exhibit B, memories appearing and disappearing before me like smoke.

it came across very strongly to me that the speaker is lost, haunted, sad, angry, hopeless and helpless. he's tired and empty, trying to find his lost self amidst his memories/the past, afraid to look at who he has become/will become. through it all, there is a sense of an inescapable and inexorably increasing pressure from a society that doesn't accept him and alienates him. (i really liked the images of singapore as oppressive/overly uniform/suffocating. singapore is never named, but the sense of pressure that underlies everything is so familiar.) there's a soul-deep weariness and the repetitive dullness of it all. every now and then, there are flashes of a hopeful dream of something better -- but it's very quickly smothered.

it's not an easy read but it's very spellbinding and it really gives voice to some of the fears of living here -- the sense of suffocation, wondering whether anything will ever be different/better, fearing losing oneself in order to fit in, feeling like there's no escape.

[Mirvan. Ereon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Cyril Wong's concept in this book. The poems are title-less and each poem seem like a prose poem or a flash fiction, little anecdotes and thoughts and perhaps dreams by the author that are captured in one flowing torrent of beautiful words and images.

What I hated about this is the poems have no recognizable titles so I am forced to list my most favorite poems by their page numbers. But this almost a joke because I don;t really care if they have no titles. They become more appealing that way because it made me more focused to absorb and remember my favorite lines. This book seems like the first edition of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman where the whole book seems like one tremendous epic poem. What I love to do with it is to 'hopscotch' within the pages (inspired by Julio Cortazar's Rayuela or Hopscotch). Just open a page and read an extract of a poem, rather than reading it from the beginning to the end. I like reading poetry books this way, especially if I have the real book but for ebooks, I would have to read it from start to finish because that is the easiest to do.

Get a copy of this. This is the first poetry book i saw in this style. The eloquence of Cyril Wong's poetry is astounding and even disturbing because it is too good for me. He is a very big influence on my current style of poetry.

I will forever be a reader of this author. I have proven that each of his book I read is a rewarding experience.

[Hao Guang Tse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tantalisingly ripe with the possibility of Freudian over-interpretation, Wong's Oneiros is an intersection of confession, surrealism and an almost nihilistic brand of buddhism. I am left with images. A car slowly driving backwards through the wake of a collapsing civilization as two lovers - clearly the discontents - kiss, 'Hercule Poirot, Anne Sexton, the Road Runner' make their appearances, an imagined father and mother take their bows. Wong practises a poetry of evocation, desiring his readers to feel first and think later, and this is partly why it is hard to write a concrete response to this work. I am left with images - but 'Not everything is a symbol in the dreamtime'. In this sense, in my attempts to interpret, I have already forgotten what I read. Maybe I should start dreaming.

[June · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about dreams is the book you read when a dream you had a week ago still haunts you to this day with the same intensity when it happened, and you cannot make sense of it no matter how hard you try.

Dream is often used in positive light in most of the cases... not in Cyril Wong’s book.

-

This time I would not care if I was late and wander out into the field instead to gaze upon the school’s cracked and tired face. I would forgive it by admitting that this was a place of learning after all, that what I endured in its humid rooms were not just lessons on grammar and arithmetic, prejudice and self-hatred, but also on self-knowledge and a mental tenacity.

-

”Isn’t this what
class means?” I asked. “Daring
to be happy entirely?”
You shook your head, the way
I shook mine too in real life,
as I coalesced into the jaded
self I could not shake off,
no matter how hard I tried.
I wish I could dream now of
the people we could have turned
into if we had only left our hearts
switched on like dazzling
torches into our future, pointing
the way like resilient stars
into the nights to come, so that
we would not have to fear
losing sight of who we were,
or what we would finally become.

-

I board another bus and you are waiting in the backseat; unlike me, your eyes seem to bear all the answers. I sit beside you and you hold my hand, not caring what anyone thinks. Then it is just me on the bus now, since you and I were always one and the same.
Someone in front presses the bell, the present calling me to rise from my seat, to step off this bus and into a future for which I am unprepared, where my name makes sense even when I no longer do.

-

Or would he
not recognise me after all this time
and drive on by, disappearing
for good into that infinite night
which is still ours, at least, to share?

-

Today, you are already up and ready to go
before I can miss you. (Or is this a dream
I have made up to idealise our parting
like a moment in a poem?)

-

”But I cannot leave those who matter,”
I tell her, and to remind myself.
She nods and says, “Then they’re lucky.
Nobody else must love them as much, so much
that you would give up death to endure
time and uncertainty.”

-

”This is because I want to keep dancing
upon the jagged rocks without a fear of falling
and curse at those stars blinking ridiculously above.
Not caring if I’m cold, or if my voice receives no echo.
Not caring if there’s still much further I’ll have to go.”

-

Even when
I am awake, I need only to shut my eyes
and I am pursuing the ideal that I may
never become. Leaning into my reflection
in the bathroom, I almost see, a shade
fitting across my face like an unspoken word,
my lot: this long brawl with anger,
my inability to forgive, an inclination to depart.
I look away and remind myself that this is
not that dream. I can believe that something
is lifting in my chest. I can almost believe
the man I have been chasing is already me.

[Andrew H · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many themes appear from earlier work. The dream element, however, allows a surreal quality to develop that suits experiments with fiction. For me, not so much a book of dreams, as a book about writing and telling narrative: "we descend like an archaeology". The "like" is important because it notes a simulacrum rather than the real thing, not therefore a book about dream data and an alchemical quest into the subconscious. After the work of H.D,. this felt somewhat on the surface of life rather than probing the depths with all its subconscious terrors.

[Julie Koh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dreams have never seemed so exciting, so full of (sometimes Kafkaesque) insight, so lyrical and even plainly charming. I could read these poems over and over again, even in the unfolding of my own dreams.

[Kumiko Mae LovingSunshine · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was okay but i didn't find myself float into that dreamy existence. I liked one poem very very very much tho

[Charissa Ty · Rating 2 out of 5]

I preferred his other books.

[Marisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love his poems!

[Shelved by Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful collection of very raw poetry regarding cyril wongs lived human experiences