Beachlight: Poems

by Cyril Wong

A profound poem on the mystical and the ecstatic and about our connection with nature.
 
Beachlight is a sustained poem divided into smaller parts that take on the anonymous voices of those lost and forgotten. A walk along a Singaporean beach transforms into a meditation that bridges an ecological consciousness to the sexual and the homoerotic. The poems in Beachlight expose revelations about the nature of desire, inviting readers to walk beside—and inside—them, reminding us of what we gain when we abandon ourselves to nature and exhorting us to reclaim our primordial connections to the world and to one another.

Genres: Poetry, Queer

72 pages, Paperback

Published October 11, 2023

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

[Andrew H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Think of a beach poem and the most likely to come to mind is Arnold's famous "Dover Beach." The sea is full" and the "moon lies fair upon the strait." A country stands between culture and anarchy and "we are here as on a darkling plain." Cyril Wong's latest work is a contemporary musing on the fluidity of life. It is a a sequence written in stanzas of fourteen lines (allusive sonnets) that follows many shifting voices. The whole poem looks beyond traditional images of moon and water to a more disturbing vision of liminality. Ironically, the publisher announces Wong as "his country's leading confessional poet" though Beachlight is not at all confessional. Such invites the reader to go looking for personal revelations -- a red herring if there ever was one. The book should be viewed as a series of littoral reflections in which people watch, are watched, and the boundaries of perception are probed. This is a beach of beauty, ugliness, secrecy, revelation, eroticism, healing and toxicity, far from modern tourism: "Not nearly Navagio or nearer/Boracay." Though the poet does consider himself to be a sort of "tour-guide" in much the same way that Virgil was for Dante! Throughout the sequence, Wong walks a tideline between fiction and reality, drawing in events as different as Woolf's The Waves and the death of Alan Kurdi, the two year old refugee drowned at Bodrum, Turkey. To tread this path, the poetry must shift through many registers, and these sea-changes are accomplished with technical skill and panache. Like Prospero, Wong conjures creative visions from the "dark backward and abysm of time." All in all this is a magical piece of writing.

[Ryle Souto · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to be like the ocean/10

Of all the contemporary queer poetry I have read. This is amazing because of how visual it is. It almost feels like by the end of it the speakers end up being one with the beach. I love that I can read about casual hookups and how it makes it seem so sad and desperate as an attempt to relieve something within you. But nonetheless, the moments that stand out in this collection are the moments of sadness. The idea that once you pump and dump you are left feeling empty. The idea that after pulling up your pants you return back to your wife. The idea that closeness is your enemy because we've been taught that queer love is purely momentary. It truly reminds me of the second bridge episode of Euphoria where Jules goes to therapy. A very soothing read from start to finish. And semen...this book has lots of it.

Final thought: In 2023, no more casual flings.

[Ernesto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Descubrí a Cyril Wong en un ensayo del libro Dinner on Monster Island, de Tania de Rozario, también originaria de Singapur. Al buscar en internet más información sobre él descubrí este poemario gay que me ha gustado mucho. A partir de la experiencia de cruising en una playa de Singapur, los versos de Wong reflexionan sobre la existencia infinita, conectando elementos tan dispares como la filosofía de Heráclito, la conciencia medioambiental, la experiencia de las personas emigrantes en Singapur o la muerte de Alan Kurdi, el niño sirio ahogado en la costa de Turquía cuya foto conmocionó al mundo en 2015. Algunos poemas son sexualmente bastante explícitos, lo cual puede parecer algo poco original para un libro publicado en 2023, pero hay que recordar que el sexo homosexual entre hombres no fue descriminalizado en Singapur hasta noviembre de 2022.

[Julie Koh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, meditative perambulation along a beach. Thankful that poems about Singapore can still reinvent themselves without necessarily celebrating or lamenting its social aspects in moralising ways. The writing feels episodic while being full of feeling and atmosphere, with so much insight about matters that transcend time and place. Each page is like a postcard, with unknown voices emerging from the dark, sometimes like a mantra or a prayer. Whether about desire (especially queer desire), nature or Being, these pages touch on such matters in a whimsical but also heartfelt way, and at one literal step at a time.

[Uma Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish there were more poems about cruising and homosexual intimacies. But the book also moves beyond desire to draw us into its opposite. It isn't exactly about a tiny country that takes itself too seriously, but it makes this point anyway by addressing everything that around it (by way of the shoreline). Singapore doesn’t have the most prepossessing beaches but there is a history and an emotional affiliation to our coastal peripheries that reveal who and what we are as a society and as individuals with little control over how social changes, a pandemic and global trends might affect us. A mystical, even national poem in many ways.

[Ksitigarbha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Serene in parts, emotionally troubled in others, full of light but also shadows. These littoral poems move and break like seawater against a coastal wall. I wasn't sure who was speaking at any time and didn't mind the ambiguity at all. It sometimes felt like the poems spoke "through" me, if that makes sense. Having lived near East Coast Beach in Singapore with my family for much of my early life, many of these poems provided me with warm feelings alongside personal memories of growing up near the sea while remaining uncomfortably "urban" or "modern". The artwork in this slim volume is quite remarkable too.

[Henry Bones · Rating 5 out of 5]

A moving transcendence through queer sex, love and walking on the beach in a country not necessarily famous for its coastal pleasures. A trip in and out of the lonely and nameless self, which can be anyone traipsing along the shore, past or present. What a trip! Imagistic, wild, serene, introspective, beautiful.