Poet Theophilus Kwek's Commonwealth: A Lyrical Tour of Urban Change

Singaporean poet Theophilus Kwek's fifth full-length poetry collection perambulates about the slim parcel of land in central-western Singapore known as Commonwealth to offer a broad-ranging, lyrical tour of the district's transformations.

- Shawn Hoo

COMMONWEALTH By Theophilus Kwek Poetry/Carcanet/Paperback/ 104 pages/$21.80

Kwek draws out evocatively how successive urban upheavals reshape the visual language of neighbourhoods. In the 2019 demolition of Brutalist icon Pearl Bank Apartments ("It is a difficult thing, to see a building / gape, and gape even wider / than the gap between its two front teeth"), Kwek contends with the end of a distinct visual idiom in architecture: "Socialist, / so, unfit for our times."

Vacated flats in Tanglin Halt see ferns "run amok along the wall's crevasses, / overthrow the tiles from their brick-red roofs" and the torn-down 1960s 10-storey flats known in Hokkien as "chap lau chu" inspire the cynical, quotable dictum: "Show me a square / of earth and I will show you where / we put to bed what could have been."