Weaving a thesis on joy and sorrow

Home-grown poet Jonathan Chan showcases his meditative language and knack for musicality in his second poetry collection

- Wong Yang

The arrival of sorrow, wrote Irish poet W.B. Yeats, is "sudden and light".

Riffing on Yeats' line, Singaporean poet Jonathan Chan unpacks the despair that pervades people's lives as a state that can produce joy.

The poems here turn on the liminal state posited by its oxymoronic title, where grief and affliction mingle with happiness and comfort, and where each emotion indubitably shapes the individual's experience of another.

Such reflections on this iterative intermingling benefit from Chan's clear-eyed, meditative language and his knack for musicality.

In the opening poem, he describes the tension between fears and comforts: "he was not afraid of standing on a stage." But the speaker is simultaneously gripped by "the fear of pretense crumbling to ash, brushing the dust of sagely/presence, of failure as a friend, / a son".

His attention to sounds and rhythms sees him melding sibilance, plosives and fricatives here. This gives the lines a strident, persistent quality, ensuring the poem hurtles towards its titular, mostly iambic conclusion: "the bright sorrow is always / ringing, always ringing, and fading / into forgetting."