After the Fall: Dirges Among Ruins

By Eric Tinsay Valles

This collection explores the creative space of poetry as a means to unravel feelings evoked by the violence of war or by everyday traumatic events. One may come to terms with uncomfortable, including unspeakable, feelings by describing them with imagery from nature and one’s immediate environment. By participating in grieving, the self can better face any lingering effects of trauma. In this creative space, dramatic speakers retell stories and give vent to contradictory feelings through silences and free play. Their accounts attest to the dappled beauty of the human condition even if the full nature, scope and effects of traumatic memories are always beyond their grasp.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ethos Books
• Release date: Apr 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9789811405020

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"After the Fall departs from and extends the poetic journeys which Eric Valles has taken you since his debut collection. His keen eye for observation is still suffused with a wry perspective, packed with references and inferences. But a sudden turn of phrase lets on that the writing has grown older and the poet’s craft, more matured."

—Felix Cheong

NAC Young Artist of the Year (2000)

"After the Fall adds significantly to Southeast Asian Literature in English and to our poetry, as much of the work is set here. Valles brings to the act of poetry a distinctly Catholic sensibility, grounded in its theology and metaphorical reach. The subjects are wide-ranging, suggested by his reading, his travels, and his Singapore experience, which ranges from visiting our history to the recent Little India riots. But above all, his work celebrates the power of the human spirit, embodied vividly and energetically, in the images and metaphors that reach directly into and sum up the experiences they address."

—Edwin Thumboo, Emeritus Professor

Department of English Language and Literature,

National University of Singapore

Eric’s new collection is a dazzling and moving collection that looks at international events of the past and present.

— Dave Chua

Singapore Literature Prize (Commendation),

Recipient (1996)

This collection is the best kind of ambush. Ideas, subject, literary forms, even languages come together as Eric speaks of multiple things in multiple, eloquent ways. There is a palpable energy to his words: a poetic Brownian force as he deepens and extends the erudition and range of ideas that already shone through his earlier collection.

—Aaron Maniam

Author of Morning at Memory’s Border ;

Mentor, National Arts Council Mentor Access Project

This collection reveals Eric Valles as a poet with the nose of an investigative archaeologist, as exemplified by his penchant and courage for mining the dark corners of psychological wastelands. Eric writes with steely resolve and dry-eyed candour, peeling back layers of flawed assumptions to uncover molten truths about hotspot issues and faceless personalities.

—Lim Siew Yea

Educator

Eric Tinsay Valles’s eye is drawn to ruptures in the social fabric, to the places where pain, conflict and violence disturb the presumptions of peace. The book ranges across histories and nations seeking what these moments have in common, and returns us, with grace of phrase and mind, to each moment’s sacred particularity.

—Jen Crawford, Assistant Professor

Nanyang Technological University

After the Fall

After the Fall

© Eric Tinsay Valles, 2014

ISBN 978-981-09-2273-3 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-981-14-0502-0 (E-book)

Published under the imprint Ethos Books by

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After the Fall

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Cover design by Tyla Lim

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Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Valles, Eric Tinsay, 1968-

After the fall : (dirges among ruins) /

by Eric Tinsay Valles. –

Singapore : Ethos Books, [2014]

pages cm

ISBN : 978-981-09-2273-3 (paperback)

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