It is always rejuvenating to encounter a new poet. Every good poet is a new voice, and new voices are testimony to the continuing creativity of life itself. When societies no longer produce poets they are suffering from a kind of famine, an impoverishment that may not show on the surface but that renders the bones of its inhabitants brittle and its secret waters anemic to the taste.
Eddie Tay is from Singapore, and is currently studying the literature and culture of Singapore and Malaysia for a doctorate at Hong Kong University. A Lover's Soliloquy is his second collection of poems (his first, Remnants, appeared from Ethos Books in 2001).
Tay kicks off with a good book title -- lovers aren't meant to be alone, but in pairs. For a lover to be uttering soliloquies shows that something has gone wrong. Why is he alone? With a title like this we are immediately plunged into the subject matter, and already have some idea of what to expect.
The book is divided into three sections. The first is a sequence of 15 poems with the same title as the book. Next come translations, also 15 in number, of poems by the Late Tang Dynasty love poet Li Shang-yin (李商隱), AD 813-858. Lastly come 24 heterogeneous items under the heading "Everyday Poems."
Poems in a sequence need not be self-explanatory -- maybe they take their meaning from their relation to others in the set. The poems in the A Lover's Soliloquy sequence are sometimes indirect, but together display a man abandoned or neglected by a loved one.
You will not find me in faces/of strangers you pick up/from streets, in clubs, in the gyms./You will see me only in the eyes/of a lover who looks back at you./There, we will ride the high winds.
The desolation of the modern city is there too, as perhaps you'd expect:
Shall I say, a city without metaphors is good/for there is no danger of misunderstanding?/Shall I die the way angels die/in a city where people live like ghosts?
The poems based on Li Shang-yin are the strongest in the book.
Suddenly, instead of the unsensual, not to say unpoetic, features of the modern Southeast Asian city, we have rivers, snow, tombstones, curtains, flowers, animals and open skies. The impression is unmistakble that Tay benefits from having another man's subject matter to work on. It seems to give him an extra dimension, historical material and situations already decided on to add to his own usual topics and tone of voice. An added richness is inevitable, the advent of his own ancestral territory -- China -- from which he is in some way exiled by living where he does.
He's said as much himself. "As a Chinese Singaporean writing in English, I'm a cultural hybrid. Or a cultural orphan, depending on how you look at it. I write in English, but I'm not English. I'm Chinese but I'm cut off from the Chinese tradition. I'm neither here nor there."
Tay calls these translations "versions" (just as 18th century English poets such as Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson called their renderings of classical Greek and Roman poems "imitations"). With them, whatever he calls them, he seems in a very important sense to be coming home. Li Shang-yin was, if only judged from these renderings, a marvelous poet. In Tay's hands his poems are economical, full of evocative detail, and both ironic and impassioned at one and the same time. I read them over and over again.
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