By Ryan Yeo

Boh Beh Zhao: Poems
Cheng Him
Afterimage (2025) / 94 pages / SGD 20.90

"Explosive" is the word that this collection lives by. Act One of Cheng Him's debut poetry collection opens with 'Declaration', a poem that eschews punctuation to immediately convey a fast pace and explode into action. The pace does not let up until the closing poems of Act Two. That's not all: the blurb also describes the collection as "explosive", and its cover depicts a vaguely explosion-shaped collection of lines that hint at its Buddhist influences. The bundle of sticks, after all, is a common Buddhist metaphor used to depict the absence of form. There is no 'real' self underlying our experiences across time, according to Buddhists, just as there is no metaphysically 'real' bundle that ties the sticks into a whole.

Boh Beh Zhao is an ambitious attempt at that conceit. We follow the life of Ah Seng, a Singlish/Hokkien-speaking persona through individual moments of his life: through the relationship with his mother, his nights out at the club, and his mourning when said mother passes. Just as Singlish challenges the formal aspects of written English, and just as Buddhism challenges the commonsense idea that all bundles have an underlying form, Cheng experiments heavily with form throughout the book, breaking formal conventions of poetry with a bang.

The concept is extremely promising and very clever, and as someone who studied Buddhist philosophy extensively, I was excited to see how it played out. Unfortunately, the execution left me feeling disappointed. The poems subverted form consistently but did not engage with that subversion on a deeper level. Instead, it often felt like those formal subversions were done for their own sake, without a deeper reason for them. Furthermore, I felt little unity across the collection of poems: working together, I did not leave with a sense that I had learned something or that I was moved by them.

I will first address the latter point: thematically, there is very little movement across the whole collection. The first two acts are the biggest culprits, and considering that there are three acts in total, that's not exactly a great point in favour of the collection. Act One focuses on Ah Seng's abusive relationship with his mother: as he moves through life, and invariably returns to his mother at the end of the poem and gets harshly scolded or beaten. What was a fresh concept the first few times slowly grew stagnant, yet there is little change or development in Ah Seng or his mother.

Neither is his relationship to his mother explored in much diversity, with his mother invariably entering the poem physically to beat him or scold him. I wonder what other ways the poet could have explored Ah Seng's poor relationship with his mother and yet his entangledness with her. In addition to the beatings, what about the subtle ways that her power manifests in the house? How does this relationship manifest in the way Ah Seng interacts with others? Could these be signposted in more subtle ways, such that the reader can make the final connection themselves? More importantly, would this diversity of depictions have injected a freshness into the collection that is sorely lacking?

Furthermore, the use of Singlish, while eye-catching the first few times, does not develop in any fresh or interesting way, and is invariably used to convey the anger and frustration that Ah Seng and his mother feel towards each other. I would love to see Singlish used in service to convey other emotions: what about joy, sadness, tenderness or confusion? My experience of reading Act One almost felt as if it was the same poem dressed in different clothes – the variety in the poems is mostly achieved through differences in setting (Ah Seng goes to school, then the garden, then the MRT, and then he gets beaten) and through experiments in poetic form.

Act Two does no favours: Ah Seng proceeds to enact change in his life, and goes to the club and to the brothels to escape his abusive relationship at home. And yet, thematically and emotionally, there is little development. Almost every poem returns to Ah Seng's mother in virtually the same way: something happens in the body of the poem, which reminds him of his mother, and these reminders are depicted without much subtlety. In 'Refract', Ah Seng smokes a cigarette, and his internal monologue reminds him that he would not be able to face his mother. The poem ends with the blunt lines: "ask yourself / do until like that / how you want to face / your mother?" In 'Fish Tank', Ah Seng hires a prostitute and his spending reminds him of how his mother would spend money on food for him. Again, the poem ends bluntly: "he ownself give this kind of money / the same kind / his lao bu use to buy rice / feed him grow up until / like that." In both poems, the reminder of Ah Seng's mother is crude and leaves little space for the reader to make an imaginative connection themselves. And similar to the previous act, Act Two also does not feature much emotional variation until its conclusion, with anger and shame being the dominant emotions that Ah Seng expresses through Singlish. As a result, even though Ah Seng performs a different action in each poem, it once again feels like the poems all say the same thing.

Interestingly, the end of Act Two is where Cheng begins to show what he is capable of. The poems slow down tremendously as we begin to enter the psyche of Ah Seng's mother. As her life begins to dwindle, we begin to see a tenderness that had been absent throughout the collection so far. In 'Dissertation: Part Two', the voice of Ah Seng's mother calls to him: "ah seng ah—," a rare moment where the informality of Singlish is used to convey intimacy rather than abuse, as she reaches out to give one last piece of advice about choosing a partner. The mother once again shows emotional depth in 'Dissertation: Part Three' beyond anger and shame, as she dives into a personal memory and recounts the tender moments of Ah Seng's birth. Cheng is clearly capable of delivering tender moments, and I wish this variation came through earlier in the collection.

Ironically, from this moment on, the rest of the book is plagued with the same problem as before, but in reverse. Act Three continues to take on this reflective, tender tone as Ah Seng grapples with the passing of his mother. But the monotonous anger in the first two acts is now replaced by monotonous pensiveness that pervades the last act without much development. I am left wishing that the collection explored the different sides of grief. What does anger and shame look like, now that the mother is gone? Does he return to the brothel or the school, both of which were sites of intense punishment by his mother? There is so much variation to explore in Ah Seng's grief that is left unexplored.

Now, to return to a point I addressed earlier. While the poems are conceptually interesting in the way that they promise to play with form, the formal subversions in each individual poem also do not live up to their potential for the most part. Take 'TOTO', for example, which begins with these stanzas:

              ah seng sitting the bus
              his phone explode
                       
                                      siala
                                      who call until like that?
                                      must be ah seng lao bu

              ah seng ah
              today got buy or not?

                                      buy what?
                                      medicine ah?
                                      suka suka
                                      call people
                                      ask buy what buy
                                      you today forget
                                      your medicine
                                      is it?

              no la siao

The poem begins with a wonderfully evocative image, with Ah Seng's phone innocently exploding, conveyed with the signature brevity of Singlish that is reminiscent of an abrupt explosion. That line is then followed by extremely pedestrian dialogue. There is nothing surprising or interesting about the dialogue that follows, save for the fact that it is written in Singlish, or that it looks visually different from your conventional poetic form. It might as well be a transcript of a conversation, rather than a poem that arranges these lines with intention. This ordinary dialogue endures throughout the rest of the poem, and the interesting opening line soon tires itself out.

What would it look like if the poet had engaged more deeply in playing with form or subject? For example, what would an explosion look like on the page relative to the quiet bus ride, and how could he have formally expressed this contrast on the page? In what other ways could he have evoked the experience of watching a phone call on a bus? For instance, would the poem have been better served having removed one half of the dialogue, leaving us to fill in the blanks of what the other party is saying, as if the reader were listening in on the phone call?

This is a common feature in many poems of this collection: the poet subverts form seemingly for its own sake and doesn't engage in that subversion on a deeper level. Take the following excerpt from 'Mabok', for example, which is another poem whose concept I love but which ultimately disappoints:

ah seng swimming through the floor
          macam ikan

          you think the fish
          can hear what the
          water on top say?
                                   
                      ah seng lao bu
                      buay tahan

                                  so much rice
                                              you eat already
                                                     come back sleep
                                                like got no bed
                                   act like nobody
                                               teach you
                                                 you think you who?

The image, and the formal subversion here, are promising. Ah Seng is swimming, perhaps even drowning, as he returns home from the club to face his abusive mother. The lines of the poem drift back and forth, even mirroring the persona's dissociation in the face of the impending abuse.

But once again, the formal subversion stops on the surface level. Consider the depiction of Ah Seng's mother in this poem. She returns to the one-dimensional character we have seen repeatedly throughout the collection so far, as she stands above the water, scolding Ah Seng in pedestrian Singlish. What if the poet had committed to the image more wholly? If Ah Seng were a fish, what form could his mother take on to complement that? Relative to the rest of the image, the Singlish is uninteresting and unimmersive; instead of ordinary scoldings that we would hear in an ordinary kitchen, what surprising things could his mother say that would immerse the reader more deeply in Ah Seng's dissociation and loss of reality?

Unfortunately, Boh Beh Zhao is a collection that promises a lot, but disappoints in equal measure. It does not develop thematically and emotionally, and would have benefited from more brevity and variety. Neither does it engage with its subject in a deep way, often using pedestrian Singlish to convey surface-level ideas that could have been engaged with more meaningfully. As a result, I left the collection feeling rather disappointed, without being moved emotionally and without feeling like I have changed much from reading the collection. Yes, there are certainly explosive moments in the book. But it turns out that if every explosion looks the same, then none of them really stands out at all. Still, Cheng's daringness to break convention shows promise, and I look forward to reading his future projects where he engages with his adventures in form more deeply.

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