Philip Holden (email: ellhpj@nus.edu.sg)
Chitra Sankaran (email: ellcs@nus.edu.sg)
Before the class meeting, make sure you have read the whole of the collection After the Fire.
There's no posting for this week, and since we also do not have a tutorial to follow this lecture it'll be more interactive than usual, with greater weight placed on reading poems closely. 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.
Remember that Boey's After the Fire will be one of the two texts that have a ley place in the examination, so don't be tempted to skip. 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 and consider whether you feel the poet's ideas change over time.
Last updated: 20 February, 2007