An Elegant Darkness
Review of One to the Dark Tower Comes by Yeow Kai Chai (Singapore: firstfruits publications, 2020)
By Maggie Wang
One to the Dark Tower Comes, Singaporean poet Yeow Kai Chai’s first collection in 15 years, is full of twists and turns, dark and challenging. Coming after the earlier collections Secret Manta (2001) and Pretend I'm Not Here (2006), Yeow’s latest collection takes its title from Robert Browning’s 1855 narrative poem, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Browning’s poem is in turn inspired by a line from the “mad scene” in King Lear and possibly also by The Song of Roland, an epic poem composed in the eleventh century. Browning’s Childe Roland journeys through an apocalyptic wasteland in search of the Dark Tower, but the poem ends before Roland reaches the tower, leaving the journey mysteriously ambiguous. Roland’s memories float in and out over the course of his journey, giving the poem a hallucinatory atmosphere. In recognition of this literary heritage, Yeow’s collection is full of real and metaphorical quests, towers, and knights (“Childe” is the medieval title for a nobleman’s son who has not yet attained knighthood).
In an interview with the Straits Times, Yeow emphasized the centrality of the journey to his collection: “Like a knight on a quest, you will encounter challenges, obstacles, imagined monsters. The book ends at the door of the dark tower, but doesn't tell you what's inside. You can have your own idea of what the dark tower is.” For Yeow, the experience of reading—of moving from one thought to the next, of contemplating the arrangement of letters and words and phrases—is as important as the substance of the text. The book is about navigating a difficult journey that might take each reader to a different destination. Those looking for a clear through-line or a simple message in One to the Dark Tower Comes will be disappointed, but therein lies the beauty of Yeow’s work. His poems showcase a distinctive set of aesthetics not easily classifiable under conventional labels.
Evidence of this uniqueness begins with Yeow’s dexterous, musical, and inquisitive use of language. “Whatever languages you're given,” he argued in the Straits Times interview, “you should not keep within their confines and get comfortable. You should explore the limits of your language and then do something wonderful with it.” Yeow’s language is most certainly not comfortable or complacent. Rather, it is bold, often visceral, sometimes cynically so. His lines, like Browning’s, are dense and often must be read several times before one can appreciate their substance. The opening lines of “Celesta” are a characteristic example:
Please, slowly move to the rear and make space
For others unlike you. Without so much as a high
Five or a tap of the wand, the nut’s cracked
Its cliff notes and left… The suite, taken aback,
Rolls out its sea then plays dead. Corralled,
Frontal lobes snake beyond width and breath,
Is where the next wave plots its next revolution.
The poem continues for fourteen pages, evoking the narrative tradition of Browning’s “Childe Roland,” yet turning the conventional form of the quatrain upside down with its unusual sequences of imagery. Yeow’s meaning here turns out to lie somewhere between the political and the philosophical, as suggested by his mentions of “others unlike you” and waves and revolutions. But before we can ask after that meaning, we must first dissect the tangle of different tenses and perspectives he offers. The distinctiveness of his tone is clear: he uses “is” as a verb of motion rather than a verb of being, and he plays on homophones and rhymes with abandon, extending the hallucinatory feeling of Browning’s poem into the language itself. Ultimately, Yeow’s writing forces us to discard our preconceptions of what a poem fundamentally is and ask ourselves how his words—and our own—create meaning as they are presented.
Once we understand how to navigate the journey of Yeow’s poetry, he becomes a poet of quiet elegance and calm subversion. These qualities are evident in the two sequences of poems that give the collection its backbone. The first is a set of eight poems all entitled “A Slit from Sternum to Pizzle,” recalling the method by which butchers cut open pigs and other animals. These poems, all thirteen lines long, are somewhat less elusive than the others in the collection and carry a sense of urgency in their interrogations of human civilization:
[Infinity] is where everybody wants to go, to scrape the top,
And top that too. The Arctic has been halved, and halved.
States gerrymandered. Then your voice, high above a dog whistle,
Lassoes wandering men lost in the jungle. …
This is no ordinary criticism of technology or global warming or political ambition. Yeow’s approach is precise and candid, but he leaves the reader to figure out whom to blame rather than going out of his way to pin the guilt on one party or another. He lays bare the ironies of human existence and bids us ask ourselves if we are not part of the world he describes. Yeow’s poems are thus a call to self-reflection and self-interrogation in form as well as substance. They shine light on our lives from new angles and push us to open our eyes.
The collection’s second major sequence—ten poems, each designated as a “Quarterly Report”—does the same. Each poem takes loose inspiration from a place or idea embedded in modern capitalistic societies. There is “Quarterly Report No. 1: Advanced Water Treatment Plant” and “Quarterly Report No. 6: Ethnological Warfare Atrocity Exhibition” and “Quarterly Report No. 8: Missing Persons Investigation Bureau.” Though their titles make vivid use of jargon, the poems themselves seldom adhere to the bounds of this jargon. “Quarterly Report No. 5: Flatted Factory Telelift Riser,” Yeow writes:
Let alone this –
Should the horses give up
And keep to the foothills, Miss?
Let alone this
Rusty silver kris
Cuts me like a buttercup
Let alone this
So should Moses have given up
The magic of Yeow’s craft lies in its ability to transform simple language into complex structures and worlds. Here, he takes us from horses heading into the mountains to the blade of a kris—a kind of dagger—cutting him like a “buttercup” to a one-line meditation on religious history. Although each image provokes questions about the author, the narrator, and the addressees, the point is not only about the images themselves. It is also about what can emerge from the subtle rearrangement of the same few syllables like the objects inside a kaleidoscope.
Though much of the collection moves quickly from one thought to the next, there are also moments of sustained concreteness and descriptive beauty in Yeow’s poems. About halfway through is a prose poem entitled “Red And Blue Contemplations On The Rolfsaker Man / In Gothenburg’s City Museum,” which, as the title suggests, concerns Rolfsaker Man, a 1.54-m, 4,500-year-old skeleton found perfectly preserved in a bed of oyster shells in Rolfsaker, Sweden. In the poem, the narrator meditates on the irony of photographing the skeleton in the museum:
Man, subtract the cells that make up the citadel, retract the prepuce and weigh the bones, flint and feathers then blow all participles away. Let the air settle. The leftovers are what we are, scattered across centuries in Rolfsaker; the cordage that got us in this touchy-feely condition …
It is in moments like these that Yeow’s writing is finest: incisive and fresh but not scattered. His lyricism is natural but not overdone. Even in its more reflective moments, his poetry stays in motion, which gives it the aura of an elegant, if dark, puzzle. The book itself is imbued with this aura: the cover is beautifully illustrated in black and white with gold lettering, while each poem in the “A Slit from Sternum to Pizzle” series is either preceded or followed by one or two pages of textual illustrations. In these illustrations, the text of the accompanying poem is presented in bold arrangements with overlapping lines and letters, so that individual words are recognizable but the entire poem usually is not. The result is an eerie yet inventive visual accompaniment to Yeow’s writing.
These visual reconfigurations of Yeow’s poems add a sense of calculated chaos and decay to the collection, cementing the breakdown of language into its most fundamental components. They also affirm Yeow’s conception of poetry as a prime source of intellectual challenge. “Poetry is not there to make you feel fuzzy, to pat yourself on the back and say, ‘Oh, that's interesting,’” he pointed out to the Straits Times. “It's not a diary entry. It's not an Instagram post.” One to the Dark Tower Comes could hardly live up to this philosophy more fully. It is a difficult, often elusive book, but there is much to admire in its elusiveness.
Maggie Wang studies at the University of Oxford. Her writing has appeared or will appear in Harvard Review, Poetry Wales, Versopolis Review, and elsewhere. She is a Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critic and a Barbican Young Poet.
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