Book review: Four Singapore poets in Scandinavia co-create prismatic collection in Lilla Torg

Lilla Torg: A Scandinavian Journey

By Heng Siok Tian, Toh Hsien Min, Yeow Kai Chai and Yong Shu Hoong

Poetry/Dakota Books/Paperback/88 pages/$18/Word Image
4 out of 5 stars

The art of travelling with friends, unlike solo travel, is finding that golden mean between one’s ego and the collective interest. Friendships, after all, are forged and broken on the road.

The same principle applies to co-writing a book, which a quartet of Singapore poets – Heng Siok Tian, Toh Hsien Min, Yeow Kai Chai and Yong Shu Hoong – undertook in 2007 as they embarked on a road trip from Copenhagen to Stockholm.

The creative problem at the heart of collaboration is, as Yong puts it, “we stroll at different speeds. / And whether one leads or plays catch-up, our lines / are written separately as we cross different streets”.

The solution is to cook up a few constraints.

In many other domains, the word “constraints” would imply limitation. In literary terms, it can be a liberating possibility.

Understanding that a sonnet limits one to 14 lines and a set rhyme scheme, for example, can save a poet from the ego’s debilitating freedom on the blank page.

In Lilla Torg: A Scandinavian Journey, the constraint is the surrealist device known as the exquisite corpse, in which one poet’s ending line is used as the opening of the next poet’s in a series of interlinked but distinct poems.

Thus, a plain-spoken line of Heng’s (“She weeps for / (the ruins of a dying body,) / the ruins of a mediaeval church”) is transmuted into one of Yeow’s baroque lines (“From the forlorn ruins of a mediaeval church in Visby, Gotland to the tourist-infested Gamla Stan alleys in Stockholm, where have you been, my lover?”).

The result is something prismatic as readers are treated to the shifting views of the same landscape considered in a different light.

Where Heng scales The Round Tower in Copenhagen, Yong descends: “Witness how the incessant rain once again / forces us back the same way we came / and out of the tower into the shifting crowd.”

If Heng and Yong draw from the traveller’s interior monologue, Toh’s contributions – all titled Nordic Epic – zoom out to form a multipart poem that forges metaphors out of Finnish mythology: “I would ask you to sing of other things, / but sing to me of what the anvil wrote.”

Yeow – perhaps the most distinctive voice in this collection with an unmistakably ludic diction – brings his poems under the banner of “Red and Blue”, reminiscent of the abstract paintings of New York-born painter Ad Reinhardt.

Written on the road, the collected poems give off scattered impressions of Scandinavia that rarely, if ever, amount to a unified view of their collective expedition. It leaves readers to guess for themselves what this mist of foggy squares and inside references brings.

In that sense, the book – interspersed with many of Toh’s wispy photographs – very much feels like a private travelogue shared among four friends, and its final product foregrounding its poetic experiment rather than offering any cogent argument or perspective.

Still, Lilla Torg contains many surprising lines that will delight and photographs that warrant revisiting in this time capsule following four of Singapore’s most prominent poets of their generation.

If you like this, read: The Adopted: Stories From Angkor by Yeow Kai Chai, Yong Shu Hoong, Heng Siok Tian and Phan Ming Yen (Ethos Books, 2015, $20, Ethos Books). In a similar set-up, the four writers travel to Cambodia and compose short stories on their trip.