By Claire Betita de Guzman

A Colette Sequence and Other Poems
Robert Yeo
Pagesetters (2025) / 78 pages / SGD 16.35

Robert Yeo occupies a position in Singaporean letters that few writers anywhere have achieved: that of a founding architect. For over five decades, he has helped shape the very consciousness of a literature that had to invent itself almost from scratch: writing a distinct Singaporean voice into existence at a time when it was still just an aspiration.

Yeo's range is formidable. He used his plays in The Singapore Trilogy to map political anxieties, and novels like The Adventures of Holden Heng to capture social upheaval. He pivoted to personal history in his memoir Routes and brought raw post-colonial tension to his opera librettos. Yet his collected verse proves that, beneath it all, he is a lyric poet at heart, masterfully balancing the personal with the national.

His latest, A Colette Sequence and Other Poems, is no valedictory lap. This collection is something rarer and, ultimately, more honest: the work of a writer still in active, restless dialogue with his past, his country and the persistent questions of love, identity and belonging that have animated his entire career. It is a fresh look at a literary founder who seamlessly balances his own life memories with the grander anxieties of a postcolonial Singapore. It is here where the big themes of Yeo's works are distilled into intimate, porous verse. It is here where he takes the heavy questions of nationhood and identity found in his previous works and softens them into something deeply personal.

The collection is divided into four sections, each with prose introductions. I found it a refreshing, intentional thematic choice where Yeo speaks directly to the reader, grounding his poems in real life.

Its opening, 'A Colette Sequence', is the book's strongest emotional core. Written after a 1966 tour of Cornwall, it traces a young Singaporean student's enchantment with Colette Veschambre, a French au pair from Paris. It was a passion fated to remain unrequited across postcards, continental distances and the geographical impossibility of two people always being on the wrong side of the English Channel. The sequence subtly draws power from its epistolarity: these are poems haunted by the letter that does not arrive, the postcard that substitutes for presence, the written word that serves as both a connection and a cruel measurement of distance.

Yeo's poems in this sequence move in short, lilting lines, carrying a sprung rhythm of longing: advance and retreat, declaration and withdrawal. Yet within this lightness exists a tension between feeling and intellect, between what the heart urgently wants to declare and what the logical mind insists on questioning. 'Say, not think' makes this tension its explicit subject. 'Time' crystallises the dilemma with elegant brevity, asking the question of whether duration is any real measure of love's legitimacy. There's no tidy answer, and Yeo is wise enough not to offer one. In 'Knowledge', the speaker's desperate search for certainty is framed as a "forbidden apple". He presses for an answer not out of ignorance – but because the mind, in Yeo's universe, cannot leave any question unasked.

The second section, 'New Poems', is the most revealing in terms of Yeo's range, displaying the full breadth of his voice. Alongside intimate pieces on faith and work, his poems on the public world shine. 'Trees' views Singapore's developmental modernity through its greenery, calling it a statement of collective will. 'The Domino Theory' offers a dry, experienced critique of Cold War miscalculations in Southeast Asia. 'Epic Poem of Malaysia' was in response to painter Chua Mia Tee's canvas, exploring how art and political consciousness can exist within a single image. 'Loyalties', an elegy for classmate Richard Gomez, closes with a question that threads through much of Yeo's entire oeuvre – what sort of Singaporean are you when race, class and history pull in different directions? He answers with genuine authority, warmed by a lifetime of friendship rendered in disciplined verse.

In the third section, Yeo includes pieces from his opera libretto Fences. A Romeo-and-Juliet style romance set in 1960s London, the work unpacks race and religion issues surrounding Singapore's split from Malaysia in 1965. Here, the craft is of a different, more theatrical order. The choral passages move between spoken naturalism and collective chant, highlighting Yeo's deftness as a dramatist who understands that political argument has its own music. Lines such as "What is this stink called home?" blend the lyrical into the theatrical, giving us a jolt of immediacy that pure lyricism might soften. The choruses stand out, brilliantly capturing the clashing political rhetoric of two countries undergoing a highly public, painful divorce.

The fourth and final section, 'Homage – A Small Town Romance', is a continuation of a poem by Yin C H, composed in Baba Malay, a creole tongue blending English, Malay and Hokkien. It is wonderfully exuberant and, for me, it is the collection's most playful piece. I was certainly drawn to pore over its glossary of endnotes, a small education in the multicultural fabric of Singapore and Malaysia.

A Colette Sequence and Other Poems captures the imprint of Yeo's other genres while revelling in the freedom of the poem. Free from the pressure of plot and character that drives his novels and plays, these poems allow him to linger in unresolved ambiguity. Instead of sprawling satire or theatrical urgency, Yeo transforms heavy themes like interracial tension and personal longing into taut, performative bursts that question the very act of writing them.

This is a significant collection powered by its author's seasoned authority. The opening sequence elegantly, and wisely, avoids looking back at young love through a filter of elder wisdom; it simply honours that early earnestness. Meanwhile, the ekphrastic and elegiac poems masterfully hold public and private feelings in tension. It's a reminder that Yeo has always been drawn to the intersection of the personal and the political, where human intimacy and grand history inevitably meet.

Yet the collection is not without its unevenness. While Yeo continues to circle the questions that matter most to him, 'New Poems' can feel like a gentle repetition of the familiar themes of nation and identity, and can, at times, feel revisited rather than reimagined. Poems such as 'Anzac Day' read more like reliable period pieces than necessary new additions to his body of work. The inclusion of the Fences arias produces an uneven reading experience, especially for those encountering the opera for the first time on the page. While the arias hold their own on the page, the political choruses can occasionally suffer without their theatrical context and musical score.

For the lifelong reader of Yeo's work, this collection is essential – not as a summit, but as a coda that refuses to act like one. It keeps the conversation going with the same curiosity and formal alertness that has defined Yeo's career. For newcomers, the prose introductions and linguistic variety provide surprisingly accessible entry points. Ultimately, the collection demands that any reader pays close attention to memory, to nuance, and to those liminal areas between declaration and doubt. To do so is to experience a rare thrill: that of reading a literary pioneer who has not merely endured but remains curious and capable of being surprised by his own material.

Yeo's verse remains, like the angsanas he celebrates in these pages, an attitude: green, confident and still growing. He has spent decades noticing how ordinary lives brush against history, how love survives its own borders, and how a small-town flirtation over a cup of coffee or a Parisian postcard written in a student bedsit can still, decades later, shoot flowers to bursting. This collection is further evidence – occasionally brilliant, occasionally imperfect and wholly alive – that Robert Yeo remains one of the most essential chroniclers of a nation's heart and of his own.

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