By Jasmine Goh

Commonwealth
Theophilus Kwek
Carcanet Press (2025) / 104 pages / SGD 20  

Before the Housing and Development Board (HDB), there was the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) – the SIT focused on building small-scale public housing estates, including low-rise walk-up apartments modelled after British terrace houses. These estates are steeped in an old-world charm – quiet neighbourhoods tucked away in the corners of modern Singapore, vestiges of history. In recent years, many of such flats have been vacated and boarded up: Dakota Crescent, Redhill Close, Tanglin Halt, to name a few. Redevelopment initiatives are consistently premised on the promise of something better, brighter, keeping pace with a modern city, growing in density and aspiration. 

It is with the closure of Tanglin Halt that Theophilus Kwek's fifth collection, Commonwealth, begins. The Tanglin Halt neighbourhood sits close to Commonwealth Avenue, an artery that pulses through central western Singapore, lined by some of Singapore's oldest public housing estates. The opening poem 'Closing Time' introduces the reader to the themes that the collection dwells on – the lights of the vacated block of low-rise buildings glow with "ghostly joy", a last trace of something built and briefly believed in, even as it yields to the future:

strip out the lights that for now, still smoulder
with a ghostly joy though the current's still,
charged as on our first day, with the thrill
of something built, and something brighter.

A survey of Kwek's past collections clearly reveal his preoccupations – Kwek has consistently written about the intricately folded complexities between rootedness, place and history. In Commonwealth, Kwek now offers himself as a historian of both personal and public memory. 'Relocations', a poem in nine parts, begins with an innocent question intended as an icebreaker among new friends during the first week of university: "What would you save if your house was on fire?" The answer the speaker gives is not quite what you would expect – "we have had a fire / in the family." That fire is no mere metaphor – the 1961 Bukit Ho Swee fire is close to Kwek's familial history. Wood and zinc, affordable raw materials for the huts of Bukit Ho Swee, became the conduit for disaster, and after the event, the fuel for transformation. The devastating fire that tore through the estate had the effect of fast-tracking the movement of citizens into modern public housing, and has been heralded as a turning point in the development of HDB estates as we know it.

Kwek's writings weaves through the kampung – before the blaze, the event and the aftermath. The ruptures in the village resound deeply in Kwek's family – he knows, more so than others, that what is publicly lost is privately grieved. The fourth act of 'Relocations', titled 'Zinc', begins with the repetition of "No one knows how it happened" – announcing both disbelief and a resignation of the inevitable. The "treacherous roof" becomes both villain and relic, all coalescing in the viewpoint of a grandchild who feels the heat of the blaze in his mother's stories: "Or so my mother, who still loves the fish, remembers."

Keeping step with the overarching motifs of dislocation and change, the most poignant poems in the collection pay homage to local spaces that have recently made way for redevelopment. In 2011, the Bukit Brown Cemetery, once the largest Chinese cemetery in the diaspora, was designated for residential development – prompting much debate about the value and historical importance of the cemetery. In 'Road Works', the speaker observes the hill of tombstones with a reverent distance, from the "pew on the 165 turning /onto Lornie". Likening the ripping of road to the biblical parting of the sea, the speaker considers the construction "a wound open beneath their feet, / of how we shaved our own country bare". There is no salvation, but a recognition of complicity: "turning up the dead, and with bare hands / building this thing, this irreparable thing."

In 'Pearl Bank', Kwek elegises the inimitable post-modernist building, Pearl Bank Apartments, that had absorbed decades of residential life. Its demise was not simply a loss of structure, but the end of a communal experience, and the death of an ideal for many who championed heroic modernism. Kwek gives life to the building: "The columns are full of outcry, staircases / weep, and the glass doors, / whose wheels are still running in their tracks." Yet, the poem refuses pure elegy, and returns to the metaphor embedded in the building's name, proffering demolition as prelude:

something new must come.
There will be rain again, and rain over
the earth, till another grain
sleeps, wakes, becomes a pearl.

One of the most remarkable pieces in the collection is 'Merah', a piece that evidences Kwek's ability to wield geography, history and emotion in a single span. Kwek writes along the eroding edge of Tanah Merah's red cliffs but widens the lens across centuries – traversing the different tides of power (the Dutch, British and Japanese) that scoured the same stretch of coast, "changed hands for so much smoke". The title 'Merah' (meaning 'red', in the Malay language) itself performs triple-duty – anchoring the poem in the red pigment of the iron-rich laterite that once coloured Tanah Merah's cliffs; functioning as a premonition of conquest and war that tint the horizon with foreboding; and evokes the national colour – "the new blocks / draped fluttering red". Kwek begins with Grotius' ideal of a commons "mare liberum" that depletes over time – from the Raffles landing in 1819, to a second erasure of sovereignty in 1942 with the Japanese occupation, to David Marshall's loss of the sea view from his home on Tanah Merah Besar. In the final movement, the speaker suggests that with roots transplanted, one must continue to accrue new solidity, even while burying what had come before:

in this time perhaps even I                  will say I come from this
singing this orphaned soil                    the only tongue I know
from where the rain still gathers           when it arrives
from where the earth rises still higher  in my sleep.

Treading the line between the public and the personal, Kwek invites us into the stillness of a half-formed home in 'Moving In'. The speaker moves slowly through the unfinished site, "a memory of workmen ascending / and descending with charts in hand, slow / assembly of shelves, parts to call a life." Even in this domestic space there is an unfamiliarity – "my hand missing the switch / in the wall before suddenly an edge / of must fills the nostrils." The poem turns inward – functioning within the wider collection as an intimate, sensory experience of the personal uprooting one experiences in redefining the knowledge of home: it is the unfamiliar shape of banister, the faint smell of must. In drawing out the unsettling labour of learning to dwell afresh, Kwek draws a resonant parallel between the remaking of home and the broader narratives of urban redevelopment and relocation.

A scattering of pandemic poems also blooms across the collection – the quietness of the lockdown had forced us to sit in an abrupt stillness, a contrast to the ever-changing landscape that permeates much of the collection. Kwek exercises a penchant of breathing new life into the quotidian, as "the shapes of all green things / begin to describe their own flourishing" ('Psalm for a Pandemic') and "numbered streets reach tenderly / in elliptical loops toward the sea" ('Report from a city under lockdown').

Kwek prefers to write within the confines of metred form, exercising a poetic restraint that complements the measured emotion in traversing the trajectory of an emerging, resilient nation. Yet, there are moments in the collection where form surely gives way to feeling. In the closing poem, 'Allegory of Rain', the disciplined and controlled verse loosens into a simmering fury carried by weather and rain that emerges as memory and reckoning:

…Not from this sound or
fury, but a wisdom in our hands: how water
put to boil makes the charred grounds sing.
How suddenly storms come to dance on zinc.

The word 'Commonwealth' itself offers a multitude of meaning. There is Commonwealth, the district in Singapore, which so many poems in these collections write towards. But also, it brings to mind the long shadow of the British empire, and more literally, the ideal of a common wealth – a shared and equal distribution of prosperity. Kwek folds these complexities into each other, shifting our gaze longward across generations, over the cycles of upheaval reaching back into our country's history, while breathing new life into the quotidian.

With both sweeping vision and technical precision, Kwek's poetry does what prose cannot – steeping the reader in the textured nuance of history, re-animating the narratives told to us by the powers that be, conjuring memory not as static record but living presence. Kwek follows in the footsteps of poets such as Boey Kim Cheng and Arthur Yap, who have offered meditations on Singapore's shifting landscape, but is unmistakably set apart in the mastery and control of his poetic voice. Commonwealth is proof that our heritage can be made and re-made through language – the memory of these spaces lingering in his verses long after skyline has shifted.

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