[StraitsTimes]No safety Kit
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(網址太長放不下 要上去的時候自己組合一下 有兩張詩集記者會照片)
No safety Kit
POETRY
I WRITE A PAGE
By Kit Chan
Ethos Books/120 pages/$16.90
By YEOW KAI CHAI
CYNICISM is an easy, knee-jerk reaction. Whether out of jealousy
or snobbery, one is inclined to view poetry collections by singers
with mild amusement, or worse, utter disdain.
The unspoken suspicion is that publishers latch on to singers merely
for their star-cachet, and not for the merit of their verse. Never
mind the talent or lack thereof.
Truth is, celeb-wordsmiths from Bob Dylan to Leonard Cohen to Henry
Rollins rake in more dough than serious poets.
Precious Jewel, for instance, aired her folio of doodlings called
A Night Without Armor in 1997. It was a ginormous bestseller.
Enter 27-year-old Kit Chan, Singapore's newest pen-wielder in a
post-Jewel, inter-disciplinary world, as she dips herself into
verse.
Released earlier this year in Taiwan as Cork Out Of My Head -- its
first print of 3,000 copies sold out in three months -- Chan's debut
collection chucks the salacious moniker for a merciful but sadly-mundane
title, I Write A Page.
It has also been repackaged for its suitably modest aim.
And what may it be? According to Chan herself, ""each poem bears a
testimony to my every joy and woe, every shame, every triumph, every
crime and every secret pain.''
To this end, I Write A Page, with a first print-run of 2,000 for
Singapore and Malaysia, is a fortuitous thing.
Riding on star appeal, it is an open book to Chan's heartland; a
charming scrapbook scotch-taped with moody, adolescent musings,
lightly-sauteed insights and, gasp, an R(A)-rated expletive.
Indeed, it endears without trying for credibility.
The whole feel is intimate yet light, punctuated by ""candid'' snapshots
strewn carelessly across the page.
Unlike her occasionally-operatic stage personae, this presents Chan
as the Girl-Next-Door, a typical 20something with tears for fears,
and laughter and guts to spill.
In other words, I Write A Page is a breezy, whimsical read that aspires
to no (faux) intellectual ambition, and is easily consumed within 30
minutes or less.
As if it is not reader-friendly enough, the populist book comes with
xinyao composer Liang Wern Fook's pithy Chinese translations, and is
affixed with a bonus CD containing Chan's reliably-sonorous recitations
of selected poems accented by Case Woo's soothing ambient strains.
At the book launch last month, the singer opines: ""I don't think poetry
and music are that different. I don't think we should view them as being
very separate.''
Sound advice indeed, for her poems operate on simple rhymes, a fetching
sing-song style, a shift of tone which emboldens and dramatises her
otherwise prosaic constructions.
Hardcore fans, for one, would notice that one affecting piece, Mr Turner
(not recited on the disc), which could well be written in a
letter/note-book/e-mail format, is actually a song-lyric.
End-rhyming lines like ""With each scar that is healing/I'm seeing the
light/I'm feeling alright/I can sleep at night'' from the title poem
may not win Chan the Pulitzer, but at least her New Age recovery-oriented
psychology is empowering in this Spice Girls/Lilith Fair era.
More often than not, her sincere artlessness redeems the lack of rigour.
Free of craft or vision, she tells it like it is.
In 10,000 Suns At 10 O'Clock At Night, she announces: ""I never wanted
to lie/About the things in my life''; and in Lover Of My Friend/Kind Eyes,
she enacts her longing for an unattainable love, but innate civility
restrains her from action.
It is within this shadowy gap between lust and mind, ""a dark chasm of
unlit roads'' as she eloquently puts it in the poem The Dream Always
Comes Twice, that I Write A Page comes alive, gaining its quiet strength
in a field of play.
I Write A Page can be bought exclusively at Popular Bookstores until Aug
31 and at Kinokuniya Bookstores from Aug 31.
--
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