The Votive Pen

A riveting look at
the fiercely original, intellectually brilliant mind of Singapore’s
unofficial Poet-Laureate, Edwin Thumboo whose poetry is key to understanding
the emotional hinterland of the city-state.

A
rivetting look at the fiercely original, intellectually brilliant mind of
Singapore’s unofficial Poet-Laureate, Edwin Thumboo. Born of Tamil and
Teochew parents, he embraced the Protestant faith late in his life. He has a
self-confessed fetish for Yeats and Pound and yet completed his doctoral
thesis on post-colonial African poetry. He taught himself the Ramayana and
I-Ching but found traces of the Odysseus in the shadows of the Merlion. He is
brusquely vocal about poetry with a purpose and yet appears a hopeless
romantic in his poems about his wife.

What happens when a mind which is such
a melting pot of brilliant ideas and contrary emotions tries to unscramble
the identity of a country like Singapore which is complex, multiracial, has
known a fierce economic growth that has often elbowed aside everything else?
The Votive Pen sets out to see Edwin Thumboo’s poetry - steadily and see it
whole - without the intervening static of earlier critical writing and with
an intense alertness to the text.