Still Hanging Around

Picking Boey Kim Cheng's Days Of No Name off the shelf, dusting it down (metaphorically speaking) and getting to grips with poems that just passed me by the first time around (a decade or so ago) was one of the most sensible things I've done for quite some time. And having started it I'm now in the happy position of not being able to stop. I went cover to cover on the first assay - now my favoured technique for any reasonably short collection of poems, and one or two quite chunky ones also - but I just haven't been able to drag myself away since then.

I love what he does with the long form in Painting into Life (for Gabriele Munter), for example. The eleven sections of the poem keep shifting perspective on the writer's paralleling of his own artistic experience with that of what I take to be the eponymous painter who was in some kind of relationship with the more famous Kandinsky. I'd never heard of the lady or her work before, and don't really know that much about it now other than what the poem brings to flaring life, but that's plenty to be going on with. In fact, I've resisted checking the background, and art-work on-line for the moment just to enjoy, and puzzle over, the poem in itself. But I'll eventually look all of it up because Boey has got me so intrigued. Isn't that, in itself, a wonderful thing for a writer to achieve? There's a kind of generosity about the process.

There're some killer lines in the long poem as well - in all the poems actually, but the poet just seems in great form when extending himself. He's generally got a wonderful way of making the abstract concrete as in the lovely: For the first time I knew what it meant / to see without words, to be seized / by the deep chord of the moment. I sort of wish I'd written that, but I'm more than happy to be just able to read it - and do so more than once.