When the Barbarians Arrive

By Alvin Pang and John Kinsella

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When the Barbarians Arrive is a selected works from Singaporean poet Alvin Pang's five previous collections, including Testing the Silence (1997) and City of Rain (2003). Wry, sensitive and intelligent throughout, the selection ranges from unsentimental love poems to sharply satirical writing. They mock, celebrate and unsettle, at once recognisably national and international in reach, offering a fresh edge and energy to the wave of urban poetry emerging from Singapore.
Alvin Pang was born in Singapore in 1972. A Fellow of Iowa University's International Writing program, his poetry has been translated into more than fifteen languages, and he has appeared at major festivals and in anthologies worldwide. He has edited the anthologies No Other City (2000); Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia (with John Kinsella, 2008), and Tumasik: Contemporary Writing from Singapore (2009). Pang was named the 2005 Young Artist of the Year for Literature by Singapore's National Arts Council, and was received the Singapore Youth Award (Arts and Culture) in 2007.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arc Publications
• Release date: Jun 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781908376336

Alvin Pang

Alvin Pang (冯啟明) is a poet, writer, editor, anthologist and translator. He was Singapore’s Young Artist of the Year for Literature in 2005 and received the Singapore Youth Award for Arts and Culture in 2007, and the JCCI Foundation Education Award in 2008. His poems have been translated into over fifteen languages, and he has appeared in major festivals and publications worldwide. He is among only a handful of poets from Singapore to be listed in the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English (2nd Edition, 2013). His books include City of Rain (2003), Other Things and Other Poems (Croatia, 2012) and When the Barbarians Arrive, published in the UK in 2012 by Arc. Most recently, he published a collection of selected and new works, What Happened: Poems 1997-2017 (2017). His collection of short prose, What Gives Us Our Names (2011), has sold more than 10,000 copies to date. A Fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2002), he is a Board Member of the International Poetry Studies Institute, based in the University of Canberra. He is also a founding director of The Literary Centre – a non-profit initiative dedicated to interdisciplinary capacity, multilingual communication, and positive social change.

Book preview

WHEN THE BARBARIANS ARRIVE

Published by Arc Publications

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk

Copyright © Alvin Pang 2012

The author asserts the moral right

to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications 2012

Design by Tony Ward

Printed in Great Britain by the MPG Book Group,

Bodmin and King’s Lynn

978 1906570 98 9 (pbk)

978 1906570 99 6 (hbk)

978 1908376 33 6 (ebook)

Cover image:

Detail from ‘Book IV / X: Centre of Dependency’

from ‘The Consolations of Museology’ (2008)

by Michael Lee (Singapore).

Copyright © Michael Lee, 2008,

by kind permission of the artist.

http://michaellee.sg/#11

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.

International Editor: John Kinsella

for Fong Hoe Fang, pioneer, boss-man, hero, friend

Alvin Pang

WHEN THE

BARBARIANS

ARRIVE

Arc.TIF

2012

CONTENTS

Initiation

Fly-Fishing

Friction

The Scent of the Real

Homecoming

Shades of Light in Holland Village

What to Write About in Cold Storage, circa 2000 AD

What it Means to be Landless

Absences

Poem for an Engineer

Merlign

The Meaning of Wealth in the New Economy

Other Things

Patience

Salt

Aubade

The Burning Room

Incendium Amoris

Candles

Rain

To Go to S’pore

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Snowscape

Loaded

Upgrading

Made of Gold

When the Barbarians Arrive

Acknowledgements

Biographical Note

INITIATION

My father taught me how to toss a line.

He rigged up the reel by thumbing

screws, stretched line like a nerve

through the narrowing

circles of the rod, gave it a quick twist

and the hook was on, curved like a

question, poignant and dangling.

I groped the supple rod, trembling in my hands, feeling

the sway and dip of it. He worked

a secret ritual with his hands, pierced unflinching

some shrimp or small fry pinched near the tail

painlessly, left it to twirl in its throes, twitching.

Or, casting for another batch,

he would clutch the ocean in a fistful of drag.

As children we would crowd round to watch

the magic hiss and hop of his net, upbeach.

When he unfolded the petals of his catch

we would wrestle like fish after fry

to taste the sea in the fresh, well

scalded shrimp – just arrived, alive, now

new within us – although

we kept our distance, lest