By Neil Murphy

fiftythree/zerothree
Madeleine Lee
FirstFruits Publications (2004) / 63 pages / SGD 15.50

The most striking quality that immediately registers when one encounters Madeleine Lee’s latest poetry collection fiftythree/zerothree is the patience, the meditative eye as it lingers on its subjects with love, sorrow, occasional pain or, at times, with a slow deliberate acknowledgement of the presence of objects, people, life. One moment we witness the fragile mother’s eye resting upon a child (“two balloons”, “house no 58”), while elsewhere the poet treats us to a serene, but incongruous event, in “egret,” when the poet ponders the strangeness of a scene that includes studious students “in a palsy” beside the egret, the “simple thing.” Something, it appears, is not quite right. In her steady pursuit of key moments, vignettes that might somehow carry the burden of meaning, the poet thankfully evades the familiar mutterings about nation, state, identity, gender, and all such predictable politicized mutterings that saturate too much of Singapore poetry.

What Lee offers, instead, is evidence of more mature insight, of a deeply aware observant eye, always alert, occasionally indignant, as in the “raintree” series of poems, in which the poet registers her anger, and sorrow, at the gangrape of the raintree “by three men wearing balaclavas/riding big black well-oiled horses,” and wearily concludes by telling us that “thus the rain fell.” The raintree series of poems reveal Lee’s disdain and sorrow without offering a sociological treatise. This is the way it is: “same old same old/same new.” Thus the poet writes of her unease in unfamiliar ways – she detects the movements in her world by allowing the images to speak for her, and in this the sensibility is poetic, rather than prosaic. Even in those moments when the poems exert a direct political overtone, as in “darklight” (“we are only told/positively the victor’s/ tales, the vanquished negatively undersold.”), they are carried to us on a sea of images that prove to be far more evocative than might otherwise be the case, with the poetic voice building a powerful imagistic network on variations of light and darkness, death and life, and a curious sense of the negative spaces and overexposures that reside somewhere between these polarities – more subtlety of perspective then, more a sense of what lies in-between. Poetry.

This perspective is limited by neither time nor space, revealing a geographical expansiveness as the poet leads us to England, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Paris, and continually returns to the varied landscapes of Singapore. The distinctiveness of the insight is what generates cohesion, and the different places simply offer other opportunities for the poet’s mind to pay attention, as in the mini-sequence “three cubes on ice,” in which the central ice image acts as a unified poetic device around which the poet’s attentive eye locks onto three distinct life dramas, revolving around, respectively, a man in KL carrying melting ice atop his motorcycle, a 35 year old Singapore scene in which a man in Telok Ayer saws through ice, followed, eventually, by a contemporary refrigerated truck in the “air-conditioned village,” Singapore. The effect of this boundless journey through history and geography is that the life-force of some of the individuals somehow finds utterance in the carefully composed images that have given them life. It did, it does, mean something, this “fighting time in the heat of the moment.”

One of the dangers that accompany the kind of episodic poetry that Lee writes is that in the accumulation of description insight can give way to itemizing, an overwriting of certain images or scenes, and with some of the poems in the collection there is this sense of the event having been overwhelmed by excessive description. For example, in “ayung river,” the desire to render the pond visible results in overstatement: “the crimson African tulips/there the white talcum jacarandas/ and endless long-necked coconuts/peering over the coiffure of the yellow flame of the forest/like an overly affected stylist.” It is possible, in this instance, that the poet is ironically registering her own awareness of the “affected” overwrought cluster of images but that doesn’t fully redeem it and offer purpose. While in many of the poems assembled here there is a powerful, understated sense of the indefinable, some others required a little pruning. In addition, a very fine distinction exists between masterful, resonant poetic understatement and muffled ambivalence, and again there are places when this reader was left grasping for a sense of importance, in poems like “coffee,” and “seine.” Sometimes the power of the image(s) simply will not rise to the requirements of poetic significance, and sometimes an episode is just an episode, without the tremulous presence of a poem. But the successes far outnumber the weaknesses, exemplified by the marvellous closing lines to “as yet unfulfilled”: “punching my thoughts into the bowels/ of a gigabyte trapped in magnesium alloy skin/hoping for gratification.” Here the quality of writing speaks and transform the episode from being a diary entry to a poem.

Throughout this collection there is a quality of silence, a sense of the world being attended to with respect, with something more intriguing than intelligence, and with a weariness that is frequently overcome by a fascination for the world in all its minutiae. This is partly because the poet clearly knows that poetry is rarely about the poet, always about the event, the moment, that it plucks from the maelstrom of living flotsam that populates a life.

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