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Synopsis :

In this recording, academic Ban Kah Choon notes that recently, there has been an upsurge in poetry publishing in Singapore. Poets like Chandran Nair, Robert Yeo and Arthur Yap have produced three books of poems in one year. Among the best books is Chandran Nair's 'Once The Horsemen and Other Poems'. Chandran is a highly capable poet who is at home in Singapore and the West. He has both an European and Asian intellectual mentality and his poems reflect a new type of sensibility emerging in Singapore that is tough minded, masculine and restless. We then hear a reading of Chandran Nair's poem 'The Land'. Mr. Ban feels that local literature should be able to capture the spirit of life around us. He looks at two novels published in the  last two years. The first is Goh Poh Seng's 'If We Dream Too Long'. This valuable piece of social history attempts to depict the life of a clerk. But Goh made the mistake of removing words from their social matrix and tries a little too hard for effect. The other novel, Michael Soh's 'A Son of a Mother' is marred by lapses in English and bad editorial proof reading.  But it is more genuinely a Singaporean book than Goh Poh Seng's and captures the contemporary Singapore spirit very well. We hear a passage from the book. Mr. Ban concludes by saying that all local literature has value. The initial movement towards a national idiom will produce bad poetry. But the final effect is to bring about a sense of life possible only within a certain society so that Singaporeans reading it 20 years from now will be able to recognise the Singapore they know.