The Best of Edwin Thumboo

Singapore Pioneer Poets

by Edwin Thumboo

Edwin Thumboo, Emeritus Professor and Professorial Fellow, National University of Singapore, has been involved in Singapore’s literary developments since 1951. A recipient of the Cultural Medallion and numerous other awards for his poetry, Thumboo remains one of Singapore’s most distinguished and widely acclaimed poets to this day.

Here, for the first time, is a definitive collection that gathers the best of Thumboo’s work. Including his most prominent poem, Ulysses by the Merlion, this collection of over 150 poems personally selected by Thumboo celebrates the landmark contribution he has made to Singaporean literature.

“He was at the forefront of Singapore poetry when it was founded and he is at the forefront of Singapore poetry now.”
— Dennis Haskell, Professor of English, Communications and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia; editor of Westerly magazine

Genres: Poetry

256 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2012

About the author

Edwin Thumboo, Emeritus Professor and Professorial Fellow, National University of Singapore, has been involved in Singapore’s literary developments since 1951: editing, anthologising, initiating programmes (eg Creative Arts Programme with the Ministry of Education), running a poetry column in The Straits Times, teaching a degree-level creative writing course etc. He published Rib of Earth (1956), Gods Can Die (1977), Ulysses by the Merlion (1979), A Third Map (1993), Friend (2003), Still Traveling (2008), and Bring the Sun (poems from out-of-print volumes; 2008). He is working on a volume of translations into Chinese, as well as a Selected Poems due to appear in 2012. Studies of his work include Ee Tiang Hong, Responsibility and Commitment: The Poetry of Edwin Thumboo (1997) and Peter Nazareth, Edwin Thumboo: Creating a Nation through Poetry (2008), Essays on Edwin Thumboo has contributions by Jonathan Webster (editor), Thiru Kandiah, Wong Phui Nam and Lily Tope. He has edited Seven Poets: Singapore/Malaysia, An Anthology (1973), The Second Tongue: An Anthology of Poetry from Malaysia and Singapore (1979), and was General Editor for the Anthology of ASEAN Literatures: The Poetry of Singapore (1985), and The Fiction of Singapore (1990). He received the National Book Development Council of Singapore, Book Award for Poetry in English (1978, 1980 and 1994), Southeast Asian Writers Award (1979), Singapore’s Cultural Medallion (1980), ASEAN Cultural and Communication Award in Literature (1987), the Raja Rao Award (2002), and the Meritorious Service Medal, Singapore (2006). A Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa (1977), he has given readings in various universities and international literary festivals and book fairs.

Reviews

[Tish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favourite poems:

ROOTS
- Renovation
- Temasek
- Shiva
- Dragon Strikes

FEELING HISTORY
- Games
- Sunshine and Shadow
- The Exile

ALL IN ALL
- Rediscovery
- Hawaii
- Chin's Garden – I
- Friend

PEOPLE, MOMENTS, PLACES
- Driving Through the PSI
- Gods Can Die
- Plush
- The Sneeze, Hock Lam St, nr City Hall
- A Boy Drowns, Bukit Timah Campus
- The River

NUMINOUS & MAKING
- A Poet Reading
- Words Loop Again
Every poem in this section had stronger, more beautifully abstract imagery and phrases in general than the other sections, but only these two particularly stood out.


Favourite passages:

ROOTS

We have a promising amalgam––
Youth, anger, a kind of will, a style of politics,
And bargain hard, sell common and unlikely things;
Are kind or rude or merely reasonable. Some stay
Awake to match the moon; eat bats, chateaubriand;
Sing old songs that have the rhythm of the sun;
Beatleise the stage; turn traditional and keep our
Streets soft with the quiet of the night.
- Catering for the People

Earth and sky protect
The worthy in their quest,
For quiet, unspectacular lives.
- Dragon Strikes

FEELING HISTORY

The Professor favoured Chinatown,
Not surprisingly, his thinking crowded,
Bred by city living. The teeming interchange
Of word and gesture; the odour of ordinary
Lives; intimacies overdone, or underdone;
Privacy come to grief; private grief made public,
Were seen as energies of a proper order, breaking
The loneliness of man. It had the right perspective,
He said, in the middle of tourist Chinatown.
The flats were fine, but parcelled out too neatly.
- The Way Ahead

ALL IN ALL

If you should go
Soft as midnight petal
Or the secret moon's eclipse;
A flame that slays itself
Or pride turned pure in suffering,
Surely the heart will be undone.
- The Leaving

At Jemaluang an obsessed leopard's claw
Marked a tree with the full angry power
Of death and yet it blooms.
- The Return

We are consoled knowing
There is a covenant
Beyond the body's season.
- The Return

PEOPLE, MOMENTS, PLACES

There is no conclusion.

Except
The dispensing sun
Engulfs the trees,
Blazes the evening,
Will inflame again.
- Moments in a Day

Once
There was a quiet island,
With a name.
You must believe me
When I say that sunlight,
Impure but beautiful,
Broke upon the bay, silvered
The unrepentant, burning noon.
- Island

My day begins to heal, regain
A modicum of poise as evening takes
Nostalgia which the sky implies.
- Evening by Batok Town (read aloud)

Little rhythms grow, mitigate, recall
A sigh upon a falling leaf, the drifting wind,
A pulse from the crypt of memory without
Which, O City, great with ambition,

You would be a strange invention.
- Scene

Sap abates to innuendo, driving leaves
A brilliantly inscribing orange-brown.
They fall, unsucceeded, answering season's
Final call as lovers touch miracles,
Come dreaming of latent journeys,
Forgetful of the moment's soft deceiving.
- Autumn, Iowa City

Your waters pacify the sun, then lift sad lilies;
Magnify the Milky Way; take up tiny stars,
Mute the wild tumble of angry cataracts,
Then flow quietly onto succulent plains where
The doe drinks with no leopard in her eyes.
You push the world's roots to speak in flowers.
Cleanse us, moreover, along your sacred banks.

For we write beautiful and wretched lives.
Whose contradicting seasons enchant and loot.
- The River

NUMINOUS & MAKING

It is special; guard it well; without it
Worlds and journeys stay unremarkable.
Stars burn and comets blaze without mythology.
More modestly, falling rain is water, not harp
Strings singing a valley back to life.
- It Is Special

So the words we live by,
Sacred and profane, consonantal,
Words that came in marvellous whispers
Or were torn secretly for food,
Now fit my mind, fit my soul
To become the real thing.

Love among the ads.
- Words II

Spun in curving steel, you stride
Millennia, carrying the sum of human history;
Arch back into beginnings, then loop ahead,
Powering ancestral visions, urban dreams.
- Double Helix, Promenade

[Darcel Anastasia · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the pioneers of English literature in Singapore and often hailed as Singapore's unofficial poet laureate, Emeritus Professor Edwin Thumboo is definitely one of my favourite poets. His poetry is a must-read for all and should be seen as an important window into perceiving and understanding Singaporean history.

I'm very honoured to have had Professor Thumboo grace an event I organised when I was president of the NUS Literary Society, and how very happy I still am up to this day as he wrote me a touching note!

[Sabrina Loh · Rating 3 out of 5]

In many ways, Edwin Thumboo is both overrated and underrated at the same time; his personal poems are often overlooked in favour of his public pieces, which is a shame, considering how tender his many introspective poems can be, as presented in this volume.