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 riveting 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, and has known 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.