Amateur and student poetry – the two
are not the same but have sufficient overlaps to often be considered
inter-changeable – are often beheld with trepidation. What new insights can
they bring to the themes of loss and love, the reader must often wonder. So it
is with similar apprehension that this reviewer approached the present collection.
Ostensibly a publishing project that stemmed from Nanyang Technological
University’s creative writing programme and poetry workshops in Singapore, Kepulauan
– more about the title shortly – has taken a life of its own, independent of
its content’s guided, academic origins. The poems on show here are, mercifully,
free of the trite classroom demands for that precise balance between technique,
image-making and faux-profundity. It helps, certainly, that many of the
featured poets are not new to the game; some of them have experienced relative
degrees of publication success.
The title, Kepulauan, is
perhaps the only thing about the collection that reveals the scholarly roots of
these poems. The word, Malay for ‘archipelago,’ is derived from an in-joke
about the remoteness of the NTU campus’s location. But it is also an extended
trope for the simultaneous separateness and interdependence that lay at the
heart of insularity itself – island-states, the poetic consciousness, human
introspection. And this anchor is also what gives Kepulauan’s gathering
of 79 poems and 27 poets a comfortable sense of coherence. With each poet given
four to five pages to showcase their work, Kepulauan is surprisingly
unencumbered by thematic disparity that might have been expected from a
collection of its kind. Credit is due the editors for keeping the
organisational principle simple – and arbitrary: the poets are organised
alphabetically. Islands, we are reminded, remain affixed in position but their
energies and the way they relate with each other can be as fluid and dynamic as
their inherent reserves can muster.
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