Marshall Cavendish Editions (2024)
Reviewed by Jane Frank, StylusLit.
Award winning author Felix Cheong’s most recent book is an ekphrastic poetry collaboration with Singaporean artist, Sam Lay. In this collection, Cheong responds to 49 images that combine photography of everyday items enhanced by line drawings in black marker from Lay’s Life in a Notebook series, to prompt a “revision” by the viewer.
Cheong states in the book’s introduction that that his instincts are brought to life by the “mischievous manner [in which Lay has] hidden ordinary things —scissors, screws, staplers, whatever within easy reach at home— in plain sight.” In this way, Cheong’s poems deploy the technique of defamiliarisation in lyrical, witty and satirical ways.
The book’s epigraph is taken from American writer Pat Schneider’s ‘The Patience of Ordinary Things’ from her collection The Weight of Love (Negative Capability Press, 2019):
I’d been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish
Cheong has previously authored 26 books across a range of genres including the graphic novel and noir detective series’ and is an adjunct lecturer with the University of Singapore, while Lay is a well- known cartoonist whose artistic practice blurs the lines between the familiar and the unfamiliar to create a visual world “that feels both familiar and refreshingly new.”
In his poems, Cheong addresses themes such as human heartbreak, working life and the making of art. In ‘Success’ [23], for example, where the accompanying image features a line drawing of a unicorn with a photographic screw as its horn, Cheong’s poem incorporates the lines:
Suck it up, smell the green
When the bosses slap your back
Your talent is like nothing they’ve seen
You’re now paid goods on their rack
Each poem is its own complete world and Cheong imagines himself into other lives. Here, the poet writes of a talented young executive that goes on to suffer a breakdown —
Later, stutters will come, in good time,
In the shower or battle with wine
In another poem, titled “Till Love Do Us Part’ [71], the artist uses paperclips as footprints in the accompanying image to inspire Cheong’s fictional poem about the end of a relationship:
But what’s a promise but a lie
Yet to find its feet? The days walk
Away from her but not a sign
He has changed; only far less talk
Often, poems have punnish titles such as ‘Eyes Without a Face’ [75] and ‘Smoke Gets in Your Highs’ [65]. Unusually, most lines start with a capital letter. Many poems are playful and create narratives for the artworks themselves that seem mostly detached from the poet’s inner emotional life. However, in a few instances, including in the poem titled ‘Things’ [61], where a pencil is being sharpened by a line-drawn axeman, the writing feels more personal:
There are days only an axe would do,
Within earshot of an alarm
As frightening as who gives a fuck
While you hack through memory
Screaming from its hold –
And the poem goes on to note specific recollections of a relationship:
…Anniversary cards with the choppy
Patience of her poetry;
That boat of a magnet from Phuket
Broken in two when you fisted the fridge …
Poems are varied in their structure — there are poems that employ couplets (rhyming and unrhyming), tercets, quatrains and numbered stanzas as well as a series of 12 haiku, including this example titled ‘Ghost on the Dancefloor’ [79]:
The swan, relevé,
Perches on art of perfect,
There, I spot my ghost.
Here, in Lay’s paired image, a stapler is opened at an obtuse angle to recreate a dancer’s Can Can pose and the dancer’s torso and face are drawn in.
The cover image is enticing — a pair of reading glasses have been converted into a swing where a sketched woman sits, her curvaceous back to the potential reader.
This is a quirky and whimsical collection from a poet whose work has been widely anthologised and nominated for the prestigious Frank O’Connor Award as well as the Singapore Literature Prize.