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Please read the following text:
This will be our last formal class meeting. You will be working on your final essays, so there will be no critical or theoretical reading. Boey's collection of poems may enable us to revist and review many of the topics we have discussed over the semester, while at the same time moving to a new genre--poetry.
One useful thing to do may seem counterintuitive: read the collection backwards. After the Fire not only includes new poems written by Boey over the last few years, but also some of the best poenms from his previous collections, arranged in a reverse chronological order. If you read the collection from back to front, you'll gain a sense of his development as a poet, and also perhaps see how his poems move from alienation to motifs of travel (both physical and mental), and finally to a return to both Singapore and to more personal matters: his father and his daughter. All of these changes also confront both Singapore's modernity, and Boey's own position, a poet transversing space in a modern world.
The poems that I want to look at intensively in class, though, are "Paradise," "The Planners," "The Howrah Station,""Day of No Name," "Placenames," and "After the Fire," so look closely at these, but do range more widely in the collection, and be prepared to direct discussion towards a poem you consider particularly interesting.
Last updated: 26 September, 2007