Boey kim cheng biography of william hill

On a cold, winter afternoon in Cambridge, England, propped against my bed and feeling the knots in the carpeted floor, I discovered the poems of Boey Kim Cheng. At the time, I’d joined my university’s Decolonise English Campaign, but had sheepishly found myself ill-acquainted with the English-language poetry of Singapore. Nestled deep in the heart of empire, an ability to articulate a national lineage seemed necessary. If not as a representative of Singapore, then in being able to provide counterexamples from the post-colonial world—different experiences, different conceptual frames, different Englishes. I’d purchased a copy of Clear Brightness, Boey’s fifth collection, to read after going through the Collected Poems of Arthur Yap. I began to leaf through the pages and once I started reading, I found I couldn’t stop. Lines from the book’s eponymous poem, “Clear Brightness”, have remained with me:

Here the bush is charred, the trees
splintered, pulverised like Dad’s bones
after

‪Kim Cheng Boey‬ - ‪Google Scholar‬

biography Boey Kim Cheng emigrated from Singapore in to Australia, eventually settling in Berowra, New South Wales.