New work by late M'sian poet

Two young editors have worked to posthumously publish In The Mirror: New And Selected Poems Of Wong Phui Nam

- Shawn Hoo

Up until the hours before he died at 87 on Sept 26, 2022, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian poet Wong Phui Nam was fiddling restlessly with two manuscripts, making minute revisions to lines from six decades ago and compiling a collection of new poems he had titled In The Mirror.

The late giant of Malaysian poetry’s new work and his own retrospective of his oeuvre might not have been published, if not for two young writers — Singaporean poet Daryl Lim Wei Jie and Malaysian scholar Brandon K. Liew — who have painstakingly edited In The Mirror: New And Selected Poems Of Wong Phui Nam (2025).

“At eighty-six, I am of an age / old enough to hear silence / in the winnowing in the wind of turning days,” writes Wong in one of his final poems, hearing silence “in the rumble of a mountain breaking asunder”. It is a nod to one of his earliest and best-known poems How The Hills Are Distant (1968), in which he writes: “When I am dead... I shall only stir / like stones that drag the muddy bed.”

Lim, 35, befriended Wong in 2017 and had just met him at his house in Brickfields a day before he died, when they talked about his manuscripts. He says: “As Covid-19 hit and he became more isolated from the outside world, poetry became his main preoccupation. In a way, it became an emanation of his own existence.”