STEEP TEA: Leong Liew Geok



Another Singapore poet quoted in Steep Tea is Leong Liew Geok. My poem "Singapore Catechism" rings changes on an evocative phrase in her poem "Exiles Return." From her "laterite roots," I go from literal to lateral to littoral to literate to lottery to latterly to litany and back to laterite, in trying to answer the Singlish question "You go where?"

Born in Penang, Malaysia, Leong moved to Singapore in 1981. Thereafter, she published two important collections of poems, Love Is Not Enough (1991) and Women without Men (2000). The gardening poems in her second book represent a signal achievement in Singapore poetry. Alternating between lyrics and dramatic monologues, they are a sustained engagement with the cultivation of both self and environment.

Singapore Poetry is reprinting the informal sequence of poems as the first of its "Special Focus" series. An avid gardener, Leong shot photographs of her garden for the series.

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