Over the weeks leading up to the release of New Poetries VII we're introducing each of the featured writers and sharing some of their thoughts on their work as well as a poem. This week's blog is from Theophilus Kwek:
Born in Singapore, Theophilus Kwek has published four volumes of poetry – most recently The First Five Storms, which won the New Poets' Prize in 2016. He has also won the Berfrois Poetry Prize and the Jane Martin Prize, and was placed Second in the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation. His poems, translations, and essays have appeared in The Guardian, The North, The London Magazine, Cha, The Irish Examiner, and The Philosophical Salon. He previously served as President of the Oxford University Poetry Society, and is now Co-Editor of Oxford Poetry as well as Editor-at-Large for Singapore at Asymptote.
Having grown up with the even cadences of the King James Bible and Shakespeare’s plays, I arrived here in 2013 to find a rhythm – of speaking and living – that was more troubling and yet more alive: an urgent, all-embracing pulse that gently remade all my expectations in favour of a younger, more diverse Britain. I quickly found community among those of different accents and persuasions, and lost an initial shyness over my Singaporean voice. In those first months, this was my country of welcome.
But other currents began to build across the country, becoming visible at the elections of 2015 and 2017, divisive leadership contests, and the EU Referendum. Visible, too, in slurs and headlines, repeated in pubs and at street corners. Some of the following poems reckon with these currents – from the rhetoric of the Brexit debate (‘24.6.2016’) to my own experiences of personal violence (‘Occurrence’). ‘Westminster’ reflects on how questions of difference have become tangled with those of fear, and how to live bravely, while ‘Road Cutting at Glanmire’ speaks to longer-term changes which have taken place across the British Isles, and what it means to lose a landscape one knows as home.
The other poems in this set are arguments with myself, living abroad and finding belonging overseas as a son, student, and (post-)colonial subject. ‘What It’s Like’ returns to my brief spell of National Service before leaving Singapore, with a newfound perspective on what it means to have been trained to kill for one’s country at age eighteen. A trio of poems – ‘Camerata’, ‘Requiem’, and ‘My Grandfather Visits Pyongyang’ – revolve around my grandfather’s death in 2015, while he was travelling in China. The prospect (and reality) of losing a loved one at a distance recurs in these pieces, prompting me to consider my own distance even from those who are geographically close by.
‘Moving House’, among the last of these poems to be written, is framed against all of these things. It takes its immediate context from my parents’ decision to move out of our family home of the last decade during my time abroad, the experience of returning to a strange new room, and learning to inhabit it as my own. But such local movements might best be seen as gestures towards other, less quantifiable shifts. We inhabit new worlds, and our words must make sense of them.
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Westminster
22 March 2017
i.
Broken light, high water. Here and elsewhere
the cold thought of something beyond belief
settling into movement – an unstoppable design –
lodges in the throat, will not be sung.
We fall on words made for other means:
Visibility, four miles. More clouds than sun.
ii.
Within days, it seems, this injury
will join the rim of that other, deeper cut
over which no scar can form. Unclean, unshut.
As yet it gapes distinct: flesh wound, a loss
without name and yet no easier
to reckon, its surface so bare of facts
except the act of loss itself, no choice
or distance, no motive, no face, no legend,
(a mere expanse which holds the skin apart)
no way to map the way to map a way.
iii.
Lines open for interchange. The earth trembles,
holds fast this steel heart, its brave circulation.
Every safe passage a jubilee. Who are they
whose paths must cross at our deepest station?
iv.
Already, without doubt, we have begun to fear
and fear the upshot of fear, the lightning and the storm.
But darkness now, which passes for calm.
A prayer:
v.
For each morning that takes place unawares.
The still scalding shower. The flight of stairs.
Listen to Theophilus read Westminster here:
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New Poetries VII is available to pre-order now at the Carcanet website, and will be published in April 2018.
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