The Votive Pen

A riveting look at the fiercely original, intellectually brilliant mind of Singapore's unofficial Poet-Laureate, Edwin Thumboo whose poetry is key to understanding the emotional hinterland of the city-state.

Born of Tamil and Teochew parents, he embraced the Protestant faith late in his life. He has a self-confessed fetish for Yeats and Pound and yet completed his doctoral thesis on post-colonial African poetry. He taught himself the Ramayana and I-Ching but found traces of the Odysseus in the shadows of the Merlion. He is brusquely vocal about poetry with a purpose and yet appears a hopeless romantic in his poems about his wife.

What happens when a mind which is such a melting pot of brilliant ideas and contrary emotions tries to unscramble the identity of a country like Singapore which is complex, multiracial, has known a fierce economic growth that has often elbowed aside everything else?

The Votive Pen sets out to see Edwin Thumboo's poetry — steadily and see it whole — without the intervening static of earlier critical writing and with an intense alertness to the text.

ISBN: 9789814882132 | Published: 14 September 2021 | Paperback | pages