Poems that are a mesmerising archipelago of letters

Poetry collection Eke is a love letter to the sounds, constituent letters and polysemy of language, and a distinct debut

- Shawn Hoo

EKE By Wahidah Tambee Poetry/Gaudy Boy/Paperback/ 106 pages/$19

Each poem is an island—no, an islet—in Singaporean poet Wahidah Tambee's typographically dense Eke. Words, often just letters, cluster around a single patch of each page, such that thumbing through the collection feels like one is rifling through a folio of 40 old maps to a lost archipelago in a white sea.

Where then do these 40 concrete poems in this mesmerising debut collection point the reader to? The poems' inability to speak in the genre's lingua franca—continents of stanzas, the latitude of the line—make visible the difficulty in articulating some themes that float throughout the book: grief, terror and erasure, among others.

But not all the poems deal with such aphasia turned into visual stutters.

A poem like "sunrise" can read like a simple visual translation of the nature poem—austere in its execution, a few ambiguous brushstrokes conjuring the entire landscape.

Each poem makes do with its scarce resources—alphabetically (10 letters in the opening poem) and typographically (sized like a thumb).