After The Fire

by Boey Kim Cheng

After the Fire begins with poems summoning the dead to the poet’s new life in the adoptive country. They restore memories of the absent father and grandmother, uncovering a narrative continuity between the past and present, old and new countries, and between the dead and the living. While the new poems signal a sense of homecoming, the selections from three previous volumes register the quarrel with home and self, a disaffection that led to journeys in search of an elsewhere, to encounters with remarkable individuals, sacramental meetings that, when recalled, yield what Robert Frost calls "a momentary stay against confusion".

Genres: Poetry

Published January 1, 2007

About the author

Boey Kim Cheng is a multi-award winning Singapore-born poet, and a 1996 recipient of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award. He emigrated to Australia in 1997, but returned in 2013 as one of Nanyang Technological University's writers-in-residence; he is currently Associate Professor in the NTU Division of English. He has published five collections of poetry, including Clear Brightness, which was selected by The Straits Times as one of the Best Books of 2012. His writing is frequently studied in tertiary and university institutions in Singapore and abroad.

Boey co-founded Mascara Literary Review in 2007, the first Australian literary journal to promote Asian Australian writing, and in 2013 co-edited the groundbreaking anthology Contemporary Asian Australian Poets. In 2017, Epigram Books reissued his celebrated travel memoir Between Stations, and released his first novel, Gull Between Heaven and Earth, on the life of the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu.

Reviews

[Joan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Boey is an interesting poet, but I suspect that I can't appreciate his style. He does touch on some interesting topics on his poetry, and there are signs of maturity in the later pieces, but the selection tends to revolve around the same issues of isolation and a sense of belonging. This is all fine and good, but the collection doesn't stand out to me.

[Yi-Sheng · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some resonant moments, especially in his later, more mature poems, but too many pieces appear as fragments from an emo travelogue - especially his early pieces.