Beachlight

A profound poem on the mystical and the ecstatic and about our connection with nature. Beachlight is a sustained poem divided into smaller parts that take on the anonymous voices of those lost and forgotten. A walk along a Singaporean beach transforms into a meditation that bridges an ecological consciousness to the sexual and the homoerotic. The poems in Beachlight expose revelations about the nature of desire, inviting readers to walk beside—and inside—them, reminding us of what we gain when we abandon ourselves to nature and exhorting us to reclaim our primordial connections to the world and to one another. ‘Tender and poignant, stopping at the edge where words cannot go but desire enters in the poet’s form, these poems push us again and again to where the prosaic and the lyrical meet, where common language takes on the edges of passionate form.’ —Shirley Geok-lin Lim, winner of the 1997 American Book Award ‘There is a remarkable inwardness in Cyril Wong’s poems. Almost without exception, they leave us with the feeling of subjects—occasion, non-happening, an especially poignant experience—explored to unusual limits, and with, moreover, a language very much concurrently medium and message.’ —Edwin Thumboo, recipient of the 1979 S.E.A. Write Award and the 2002 Raja Rao Award ‘Cyril Wong mines the contradictions and frustrations of a broader existence with poems that shimmer with language, art, religion, disaster, death . . . and of course, love.’ — International Examiner