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mustardseed's review against another edition
4.0
a touching collection of poems with what i'd consider a rather particular style (i can't verbalise it but it feels distinct to me). i enjoyed the idea of the interspersion of poems written from different professions (extended metaphor lesgo), though my favourite poems were mostly outside of these. certainly i think the concepts behind a lot of poems were very interesting (from the perspective of a girl who died in an accident to a person on a death row). she also captures certain feelings, to varying levels of success. as always, what i love about singlit is how it turns the everyday familiar, prosaic, into poetry (in this case, literally).
some favourites:
- The way only recent strangers do: "studied sag of indifference / in shoulders, half-smile, again I am learning to / still my hands from reaching the way only recent strangers do."
- Domestic Premonition
- Notes from a Colonist, 2065: vv interesting concept, exploring colonialism... from the future - a future that is a new past
- The Illusionist: "Tonight, brace yourself / for my final vanishing trick: / Half of you, left tuxedoed on stage. / Other half was always inside my head."
- Museum of Aborted Romance: really captures that "almost" feeling
- Monsoon Girls: the poet and i went to the same girls' secondary school and this transports me to a different time, so recent and yet strangely far away
- Yearbook: an ode to her mother, and housewives
- Bukit Brown: "When will we tire of this constant / reaching in the dark? Never certain / of what we want, but wanting it to be there."
- Mute Swans: love the extended metaphor and imagery
some favourites:
- The way only recent strangers do: "studied sag of indifference / in shoulders, half-smile, again I am learning to / still my hands from reaching the way only recent strangers do."
- Domestic Premonition
- Notes from a Colonist, 2065: vv interesting concept, exploring colonialism... from the future - a future that is a new past
- The Illusionist: "Tonight, brace yourself / for my final vanishing trick: / Half of you, left tuxedoed on stage. / Other half was always inside my head."
- Museum of Aborted Romance: really captures that "almost" feeling
- Monsoon Girls: the poet and i went to the same girls' secondary school and this transports me to a different time, so recent and yet strangely far away
- Yearbook: an ode to her mother, and housewives
- Bukit Brown: "When will we tire of this constant / reaching in the dark? Never certain / of what we want, but wanting it to be there."
- Mute Swans: love the extended metaphor and imagery
haoyang's review
emotional
fast-paced
3.5
Amanda writes about heartbreak, treachery, intimacy with an abundance of emotion packed into neat little verses and such poignant images as two magnetised bodies colliding, hearts being seized in a tumbling of wings, etc. The series of poems which have a particular profession as their subject-matter, like 'The Physicist' and 'The Illusionist', find unique ways of expressing the same idea of fractured relationships using language and tropes specific to each profession, thus sustaining the reader's interest in them. My personal standout poem in this collection would be 'Monsoon Girls'. It is a deeply moving elegy written in five parts which are tied together by the motif of monsoon rain as it pours and pours towards the concrete, where it is 'squandered'; the final image is most poignant: 'all that is left --/heat that dulls the wet asphalt/puddles lifting like a bruise/the memory of our faces lashed with rain/staring defiant into newborn sun/till it is mirrored in our swimming eyes.' The recovery that comes with time's inevitable passing, the pain that remains, the courage to carry on.
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