Poetry: Sudden in Youth (Felix Cheong) reviewed by Richard Lord

Sudden in Youth by Felix Cheong
Ethos Books, Singapore (2009); 94 pp

Review by Richard Lord

Usually, the appearance of a “New and Selected Poems” would signal a thickish volume with works spread over decades. But this is Singapore, where you could count the number of poets who’ve been turning out good poetry consistently for decades on the fingers of one hand – and even then not use up all your digits on that single hand. Which is why Felix Cheong’s new and selected, Sudden in Youth, is a slim volume (74 pages of poems) that looks at his production spread over three other slender volumes stretching back a mere 11 years.

One is tempted to ask why Cheong even came out with such a compilation volume this early in his career. The answer was suggested by Felix himself at a launch of his book during the recent Singapore Writer’s Festival. There, the author admitted that he sees this as a kind of valedictory volume, believing he has come to the end of the trail as a poet and he does not wish to merely repeat himself in poetry.

A detached observer (say, a book reviewer) might add that in this light, such a book is justified as Felix Cheong is clearly one of Singapore’s better and more interesting younger poets and worthy of some long-view consideration. The detached observer might also note that the book’s new poems alone would have only filled an exceedingly slim volume, though they do form the largest single component of the book, with new pieces making up nearly two-fifths of the total number.

A career compendium such as this invites the reader to make judgements about Cheong’s poetry as a whole, and certainly the arc of his verse-writing career. As such; this reader, already a fan, came away with a clear sense that the author’s best work was in his previous volume (Broken By The Rain)  despite some quite strong and compelling new pieces offered up here.

Perhaps because of the slimness of the volume, Felix chose a somewhat unique way of arranging the poems. They appear not, as one might expect, in chronological order, but gathered by theme. Even within the thematic groupings, individual poems are not arranged chronologically. This authorial decision was absolutely correct: it allows readers to experience the poems as statements, or as thematic and emotional journeys, which increases their individual impact.

It also makes it easier to detect common properties in the art of Felix Cheong. For instance, it’s now clear that Cheong belongs to the School of Night – in the sense that his poems are often set in the night, and they move well in a nocturnal landscape.

Felix is quite adept at playing on the poetic potential of night while negotiating the notoriously crowded minefield of nocturnal clichés so as not to bang against too many clichés along the way. His love poems often seize imagery of dark skies and stars to tell their story. His short homage to Batman and Bob Kane, his creator, is a paen to the night where “The night is young/behind the mask./its heart is used/and blind to the dark.” Even some poems that employ no nocturnal imagery whatsoever, such as “Broken By The Rain”, seem to be set at night because of their overall feel. (And also perhaps because the poet has made us the readers feel so comfortable with the night.)

Persuing his career, we note also that Cheong has a good grounding in poetic traditions and uses this grounding wisely. One quick for-instance: he closes “The Only Mathematical Way To Woo A Woman” with the axiom “For love is never love/ when it arrives/ too young and easy.” This bears clear echoes of pronouncements on love in the Shakespeare sonnet “Let me not to the marriage of true minds …” I don’t think this is accidental, especially as Cheong gives similar nods to other great poets elsewhere.

We also see the key role that spiritual searching plays in his poems. (More on that later.) Finally, we are made well aware that Felix Cheong likes to play with language – which is not always and ever a virtue in a poet.

Right from his first collection of poems, Cheong has shown a facility in the writing of his poems. This facility only increased with Broken By The Rain, written during and after he had taken an Masters in Creative Writing in Australia.

But the problem with someone who commands such a clear facility for writing poems is that he can fall too easily into being facile. Cheong has indeed yielded to this temptation from time to time, including in the most recent poems in this collection.

Thus we see lines like ( from “Middling Age”) “Nothing is absent./Absence is nothing” which sounds like a pair of lines tossed off by the person who writes those Adidas ads. Sadly, the same poem ends with this flow of verbal flatulence: “To make happiness/ for boredom is human,/ but boredom for happiness/divine.” I couldn’t understand that on a first, or even a second, reading, then decided it wasn’t really worth deciphering. The real shame here is that this poem starts out with an appealing first stanza that draws the reader in, then heads steadily downhill from there.

The short, enigmatically titled piece “Annabel” likewise starts off with a nice play on words: “How my feat/ must have grown legs/ behind toilet doors/in this city/whose centre folds/upon itself.” Yes, a nice start, except that the poet gets six lines out of what is really only two or three engaging lines. The poem then flirts with cute journalistic spins before ending “how it must have shown up/ a country proud and loud/ of setting records/ and setting the record straight.” This might impress in a political blog, but certainly not in a poem making a statement (however soft-keyed) about a poet’s homeland by one of that country’s leading poetic voices.

But perhaps the best example of this comes in the intermittently successful dramatic monologue “Going Nuts”. As it gains force towards the end and seems like it is about to deliver a potent ending, Cheong reverts to easy cleverness to close out when he had an open field for brilliance: “Take this tide away, Lord. Take me away on this tide./Tide me over till I come to.” As a result, what had the potential to be one of the better monologues comes in as one of the least impressive.

Most of these wink-to-the-reader lines would go down much more easily in a book of exclusively new poems representing the next stage in a poet’s progress. But in what is purported to be a valedictory volume, as is this, they draw a more critical eye.

But I most definitely do not want to give the impression that all or even most of these poems are tainted by this tendency to take a quick and clever way out. There are enough truly fine and well-sculpted poems in this “new and selected” to confirm Cheong’s status as one of the best of the Second Wave of Singapore English-language poets. Let’s turn our attention to these now.

As Robert Pinsky recently noted in an essay on Yeats, “poetry can resemble incantation, but often it also resembles conversation”. Felix Cheong’s poetry in Sudden In Youth has just a little of the former, but a lot of the latter. At times, this is an interior conversation; at other times one side, the poet’s, of a dialogue with a lover, a former lover or wife, a son, or a God Who may or may not be there at the other end. It is a solid measure of Cheong’s achievement that he is usually able to render this conversation in engaging poetry that allows readers to eavesdrop on the discussion and be edified by the experience.

Perhaps the best example of an internal conversation is “Queen Street Mall, Brisbane”, wherein the voice of the poet grapples with feelings of racial discomfort perched just across the line from self-disparagement. The piece starts off in a completely conversational tone:

I want to be white and washed
like these faces in the crowd -

But then it pulls into a darker lane, where the discomfort seeks the remedy of pain and damage to get over the Asian identity:

Not brown in my cells/but bleach pouring through hair, down/ my throat, to my name stared at /and often mispronounced.

The conversation then moves convincingly to a resolution where the poet sees this bleaching, inside and out, resulting in a transformation where he will

… not be ill at ease to tell,
in a tongue coming round
to words I no longer own,
if I have been lost, or found.

These lines, indeed the whole poem, show the power that a simple conversational tone can carry.

Felix Cheong has frequently been touted as one of Singapore’s leading bards of love. There was even a local TV movie, Love Poetry, which saw an unlikely auto mechanic using the love poetry of Felix Cheong to draw the attention of a romantic single mother. But personally, I find Cheong’s romantic love poems much less effecting than his father-to-son poems, his monologues and his religious ruminations.

This is not to downplay the strength of poems such as “Missing You“, “With You” and “My Own Clearing” amongst others. And “Love Is A Stranger” (from “Broken By The Rain”) is one of the best dark-edged love poems produced by any Singaporean heterosexual poets in recent years. What lover of good poetry wouldn’t be taken by these verses? But this is not where Felix Cheong stakes his strongest claim as a unique voice on the local poetry scene. For that, we have to turn to the religious poems, the paternal confessions to his son, the dramatic monologues.

There are only three father-and-son poems in this collection, but they serve as a marvellously moving trio. The middle poem in this arrangement is “Father And Son” from I Watch The Stars Go Out , his second book. It is sandwiched by two completely new poems, “Daddy’s Not Home” and ““Father And Son II”.

The earlier poem is a philosophical meditation on fatherhood and filiality, very effectively done, while the other two are much more personal, Felix Cheong’s confessions to his son for his absence from the boy’s life which the breakdown of his marriage has occasioned. These latter two contain the most painful verses in the whole collection, and some of the most powerful. In “Daddy’s Not Home”, he offers, as a sacrifice, his own self-flagellation:

How his guilt takes a beating,
feeds into its own, old wounds,
any way to absolve him
of absence, cowardice, words
heavy with duty and use,
every day of the weak.

Here the pun in the last line comes off not as facile or too clever, but as true, a tight-lipped confession that pokes into the still fresh wound the poet lets us all see. The understated use of Catholic imagery and concepts in these two poems only enhances their authenticity.

Felix calls himself a lapsed Catholic, but he doesn’t say it triumphantly (the way some other notable Singapore poets do), and I think his work profits significantly from this position. Indeed, some of the best poems in this volume are his religious poems which come towards the end of the book. A reader gets the sense of Felix Cheong as a Catholic who may have stopped paying his dues, but still keeps his old membership to hand. That’s why Cheong can include a humorous poem (with the dismissive title “The Pope Goes Pop”) about the Vatican producing music videos featuring the Pontiff and Mother Teresa which ends with the delicious taunt:

In the ratings game,
what redeems -
the desert messenger wailing in vain
for a listener,
or the hip need for soundbites
turning the Mass, Media?

And then, just two pages later (the poems themselves were written  almost a decade apart), he offers a wonderfully touching and accomplished memoriam to that same pope, John Paul II, which concludes with the soaring tribute:

And for a moment,
you dreamed the blood ache
of a man who sings love
in roses and time
and sleeps true
on a bed of light.

What is notable here is that both poems frame John Paul II in the image of a singer, but the second pays honour to the man for the cause he served and what he was trying to accomplish, despite all his human flaws.

Eleven of the poems in this volume take up the religious question and it is worth noting that there’s not a bad or inconsequential poem in the lot. (Though the children’s poem, “Catechism 101” is obviously light-weight.) In all eleven poems, the poet comes off as someone grappling honestly and intently with questions of faith, doubt and hope that the doubt itself may empty out into a deeper peace. More importantly, this grappling is effectively captured in strong poetry. This can be done in the form of an extended metaphor, as in “Shadow Boxing” or as a straight-on wrestling with the difficulties of faith, as in “Water and Wine” from his very first collection and still one of the most compelling religiously-themed poems in his oeuvre. Indeed, I can’t right now think of any other Singaporean poet, except for Lee Tzu Pheng, who deals so well, so convincingly with religion in his or her verse.

As seems almost obligatory in this self-referential age, a number of poems in Sudden In Youth are about poetry itself or the poet qua poet. But  the same honesty, the same substance that we find in Cheong’s religious poems give these poems a ballast that they miss in like poetry by most other local writers. ( In fact, one of these poems, “Meditations” is a persuasive prayer to the God Whose approval and inspiration the poet seeks cum rumination about the duty of writing.)

When Cheong writes about poetry and the act of writing poetry, we sense the clear presence of the person within the poet, not just the skilled practitioner of the poetic craft. The whole batch of poems in this closing section are accomplished, but my favourite is the high-energy “Cutting Edge” from his second book. The first stanza is almost a sportsman’s call to action: “Keep pushing the edge,/that sneer in the street/sharpening your skill/ until every stroke knows/it’s no more alien/than a heartbeat or nail.” What writer couldn’t hang those lines over his/her writing desk as an inspiration and a valuable goad!

Still some of the most impressive displays of Cheong’s writing skills in Sudden in Youth are the pieces in which he assumes voices and delivers short, taut dramatic monologues. While most of these are from Broken By The Rain, (where he first began to explore the poetic monologue), Felix turns out two new pieces to show he hasn’t lost his knack for the form. Both “Mission Statement of a Punk” and “The Massage Parlour Girl” are fine examples of the poet slipping into the skin of someone quite different and giving us a telling poetic glimpse from that vantage point. (And I do question why he places “I’ll Make This Knife Talk” in another poem grouping; that piece is one of the most impressive and compelling examples of Cheong’s skill with the dramatic monologue and assumed identity.)

Cheong’s punk scornfully explains himself by boasting “I‘ve nothing on my hands/that’s why they’re clenched/my fists are my balls, wrecking balls/taking down fathers and bores.” The breathtaking leaps from the visual image of fists into balls and then into the double entendre which ends in the chilling Oedipal notion of that last line (whether intentional or not on the poet’s part) is a stunning achievement. In a completely different tone (that fits her station here), his massage parlour girl ends her brief revelation by noting that “I am a smile that sleeps/as my favours are being traded.” Wow.

I have no idea whether this was intentional, but Cheong finishes out the book with the following sequence: father and son poems, the monologues, the religious poems and the poems about poetry and being a poet. There is a movement upward and inward in these poems, which also represent the best writing in the collection. At the end of the final poem (duly titled “Last Words“), the reader is fairly persuaded of Felix Cheong’s status as a significant poet. And maybe a little saddened that, like Prospero (whom he cites in that last poem), he is perhaps about to break his wand and drown his book.

Felix Cheong shows us in Sudden In Youth that he is, when at his best, an indisputably talented poet possessed of an assured voice who also happens to have a lot to say. (You don’t always find that combination in contemporary poetry.) But he also shows us that his talent has not yet reached full maturation and that he still has many corners – and horizons – to explore as a poet.

This guy has a real gift, and he should continue using it to give to others. As Felix advises himself – and other writers – in “Cutting Edge”: “Never let it rust./ Leave it silent and sullen/In the dark.”   So let’s hope that Sudden In Youth represents a difficult spurt before a rest and not a conclusion.

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