Toh Hsien Min, Means to an End, Landmark Books, Singapore 2008, 56pp.

Reviewed by Rebecca Edwards

These thoughtful and intelligent musings on the unreliability of memory are a pleasure to read. Their conversational tone belies the complexity of ideas explored by Toh Hsien Min in this collection; ideas revolving around what can and cannot be recalled from the past:

‘For days that/ couldn’t seem to find their way out/ I kept a slipping hold until/ tonight I trace a path I had known/ and startle myself when I do get it:/ the rectangular porch of the hostel,/ late afternoon in Leith... and just as soon again/ I find myself disbelieving,/ merging it into another slope/ in Antrim or on Pacific Highway One...’ ('The Slope').

Often triggered by a struggle to recollect exactly where and when something took place, poems in Means to an End reflect the mind’s tendency to correlate past experiences by overlapping and merging them into each other over time: ‘I cannot remember where it was, with the bridges,/ Manchester on the telly and me wanting/ to watch the game in a black-beamed Irish pub./ Was it Toledo, which means that I was in love/ with you?...’ ('The Bridges’). The difficulty – and pleasure – involved in questioning our recollection of the past is the fuel of all history books, many family arguments, and most of the poems in this latest collection by one of Singapore’s finest poets. Whilst Toh Hsien Min also dwells upon such themes as the unreality of modern definitions of work (‘What Work Fulfils’ and ‘HR in the Time of Recession’) and the various pleasures of riesling, champagne and lady’s finger bananas, even the simple act of peeling fruit on a train returns again to what the present recalls to us from the past: ‘It feels like that morning you woke early and watched from a hot spring/ the sun rising between the trees in Akita Prefecture’ ('Peeling a Clementine').

On a technical note, I would have liked to have seen Toh Hsien Min employ more of the poetic skills that he is amply capable of: many poems in Means to an End lack compression and line tension, tending instead towards prose. Sometimes too, lines are crammed to the point of airlessness with complex ideas: ‘I imagine I would learn, and keep in heart, that/ my mind has been bounded by more than it/ possibly can have taken in, and the touch/ of a spiralling leaf in a boulevard can exert/ more concrete influence in less tactility than/ we can imagine, for we imagine we want to/ remember more than we can remember, or want to’ ('The Bridges').

Another problem for this reader are the many lines beginning with such phrases as ‘I remember’, ‘then you remember’, or ‘it occurs to me’ – lines which obtrusively signpost the mental processes of remembering, assuming, and wondering: ‘There you remember the feline eyes of the redhead whose breasts you/ almost put your nose into while she praised her baby-oil push-up bra,’ ('The Happiness of Meaning in the New Economy'), or: ‘We assume these coils are dead,/ but I remembered the news report on the Thai bachelor/ who had uncorked a bottle only for the cobra/ to spring out from organic hibernation...’ ('Snake Wine'). The repetition of ‘I remember’ in ‘Birth of the Modern City- State’ may be appropriate for a poem dealing with the intriguing question of whether ‘I remember all that now because of who I am, or the other way around’ but the cost is a lack of immediacy. The imposition of ‘I remember’ between the reader and the poem allows no other relationship between them than that directed by the poet. This is a pity, especially in a collection dealing with memory, because one of a poem’s greatest gifts is the resonance achieved when an image is deeply understood by the reader because it already belongs to them. A poem has the power to remember something important, to retrieve some precious thing – a truth, an aspect of self – which was hidden from us until the words invoked it. This, surely, is why poetry is written, and why it is read.
 
I found that the more ‘I’ assumed or remembered in the poems, the less I felt free to meditate on what the poem might mean to me. Whilst this sense of frustration didn’t stop me enjoying many of the same poems for their wit and intrinsic charm, it did prevent me from going deeper, as if I were trying to dive into a pool whose surface deflected me back out again. I was grateful for the immediacy of the brilliant ‘Love Where Love is Known’, and ‘Trajectories’, which remain deeply personal yet allow the reader to bring their own memories to their understanding of the poems.