By Shelly Bryant

Bright Sorrow
Jonathan Chan
Landmark Books (2025) / 140 pages / SGD 23.85

Jonathan Chan's Bright Sorrow is a collection deeply concerned with faith, grief, beauty and endurance, but what strikes me most was its sense of companionship. These poems are rarely solitary acts. They are conversations with poets, theologians, landscapes, scriptures, works of art, and the dead. Reading the collection feels less like entering a private notebook than accepting an invitation: to join a long conversation about suffering and hope, and to travel through the places and people that have shaped the poet's world.

One of the achievements of Bright Sorrow is the way the collection builds meaning through arrangement rather than merely through individual poems. The four sections, 'Continuity', 'Theology', 'Eschatology' and 'Possibility', suggest a spiritual and emotional movement. The journey is not from sorrow to happiness, but from sorrow towards deeper forms of attention. Even the poem that opens the collection establishes this tension. In 'atelophobia', the speaker describes shame, fear, faith and failure before concluding that "the bright sorrow is always / ringing, always ringing". The phrase becomes less a mood than a condition of existence. The collection repeatedly returns to the idea that grief and joy are not opposites but companions.

The faith poems are among the strongest in the collection because they are almost completely unconcerned with dogma. Chan is interested in faith as something lived through bodies, places, illness, memory and waiting. In 'prayer (xvi)', written from the experience of sickness, prayer emerges not as certainty but endurance. "Any pain is a mite. Any sacrifice is a whimper. / surrender is a style". The poem's power comes from its refusal to romanticise suffering while still searching for meaning within it. Similarly, 'peace (ii)' presents peace not as triumph but as grace entering woundedness. The poem culminates in the observation that "Simone Weil says grace rushes into / an empty space", a line that captures much of the collection's spiritual vision. Peace arrives through vulnerability rather than control. Chan's poems often feel like prayers not because they speak about God, but because they cultivate attention. The collection's numerous prayer poems function almost like stations along a pilgrimage route. They provide recurring moments of stillness amid poems concerned with history, politics, family, illness and environmental anxiety. Together they create a rhythm of contemplation that shapes the reader's experience of the book as a whole.

One of the pleasures of Bright Sorrow is tracing the writers who accompany Chan through these poems. Their presence never feels ornamental. Instead, they appear as fellow travellers. Li-Young Lee's influence can be felt particularly in poems such as 'homage', where memory, family history and spiritual longing are intertwined. The poem's recollection of a grandfather's voice moving through memory and dream recalls Lee's ability to transform family remembrance into something almost sacramental. Henri Nouwen appears directly in 'Henri Nouwen sits beside me on the bus'. The title might seem whimsical, but the poem captures something essential about reading itself. Nouwen becomes a companion on an evening journey, helping the speaker notice "the momentary assurance of cold fabric" and "the grip and release", of ordinary experience. The poem beautifully demonstrates how writers become fellow travellers in our lives. Similarly, Philip Larkin's influence emerges in 'without / with', while Graham Greene appears behind 'sui generis'. These references never feel like literary name-dropping. Instead, they reveal a poet actively thinking with other writers.

As a reader, I found these and the many other influences resonant because they belong to my own imaginative landscape too. Houston, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Henri Nouwen, Philip Larkin, Graham Greene and Wong Kar-wai all appear within the collection's orbit, and the result is a curious sense of recognition, as though one is being invited into a world that is simultaneously the poet's and one's own.

The collection is geographically restless. Houston, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, New Haven, Myanmar, Teotihuacan, Hiroshima, Itaewon and the Mekong all appear – never functioning as travel writing, but as locations where questions of memory, faith, grief and responsibility are worked out. The poem 'exit', for instance, traces a family history stretching across Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Houston. Geography becomes genealogy. Migration becomes inheritance. The poem demonstrates how movement through space shapes identity across generations. Elsewhere, poems such as 'at Teotihuacan', 'riparian' and 'winter approaching' reveal Chan's gift for connecting physical landscapes to historical and moral questions. Place is never merely backdrop. It becomes a participant in the poem's thinking.

What remains after reading Bright Sorrow is not a single argument or image, but a sense of companionship. The collection invites readers into fellowship with the living and the dead, with writers and theologians, with cities and landscapes, and with fellow sufferers.

Perhaps the book's deepest conviction is that sorrow need not isolate us. Again and again, Chan discovers forms of connection within grief. In 'kindness (ii)', kindness is described as something that "is conversant with suffering" and yet continues to bear love. That vision seems emblematic of the collection itself.

Bright Sorrow is a book of prayers, but also of conversations. It is a book of places, but also of people. Above all, it is a collection that invites readers to travel through a world shaped by faith, memory and attention, and to discover that they are not travelling alone.

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