Comparing Arthur Yap

and Boey Kim Cheng

Bernard
Thai Ming
Arman
Arthur Yap
 Arthur Yap
• Arthur Yap was born in Singapore, the sixth child of a carpenter and a
housewife.

• Yap attended St Andrew's School and the University of Singapore, after

which he won a British Council scholarship to study at the University of
Leeds in England.

• At Leeds Arthur earned a Master's degree in Linguistics and English

Language Teaching, later obtaining his PhD from the National University
of Singapore in the years after he returned from Leeds.

• He stayed on in the University's Department of English Language and

Literature as a lecturer between the years 1979 and 1998. Between 1992
and 1996, Yap served as a mentor with the Creative Arts Programme run
by the Ministry of Education to help inspire students and nurture young
writers at local secondary schools and junior colleges. Yap was then
diagnosed with lung cancer, and received radiotherapy treatment.
Arthur Yap is famous for his poems about Singapore. In the
poems “the correctness of flavour” and “an afternoon nap”, he
focuses on Singaporean mothers and allows us to truly
understand the poem as many of us are able to relate. His
poems can even be quite humorous at times as he stereotypes
Singaporean mothers so well.
waiting for the lime sherbert to arrive,
mother turned around to her
vacuous child:
boy, you heard what i said earlier?
nowadays, they
emphasise english.

boy rolled his squinty eyes to the ceiling.
waitress returned, flustered,

and started
on her own emphases:
lime sherbert today don't
have.
mango got. strawberry also don't have.

mother, upset and acutely strident:
today DOESN'T have.
today

DOES NOT have
 The correctness of flavour
• The correctness of flavor is a poem which greatly stereotypes Singaporean mothers. We
are depicted a story of a boy and his mothering ordering ice cream.The main ideas shown
in this poem are authority and the strictness of a Singaporean mother. The first line itself
already shows one stereotype. In the line," waiting for the lime sherbet to arrive," the
phrase lime sherbet stands out. This is not just any random flavor. The poet is trying to
show how specific even the flavor of ice cream should be. This could represent the
pickiness of a Singaporean mother.In this poem, the word mother is used instead of mom.
The formality of the word could show strictness and authority. The "mother" also refers to
her child as "boy"and this could possibly make him feel small and brings him down to a
raw state as he uses the word boy instead of son. In this poem, we also see different points
of view. The line,"boy rolled his squinty eyes to the ceiling" allows us to relate with the boy
very well as this is the way many of us would react to our mothers. This also shows us that
his mother mother acting this way is probably a usual thing. This line also shows defiance
which is a minor theme in the poem.The last stanza sums up the authority strictness and
pickiness of the mother. The phrase "acutely strident" means harsh. As the mother corrects
the waiter for her English, we can see how she needs the waiters English to be right. This
may also show how Singaporean mothers may often step out of line, and though the
waiter is not her child, she still has the audacity to speak her mind and correct her.
 Boey Kim Cheng

• Boey Kim Cheng was born in Singapore in 1965

• He received his secondary education at victoria

school and graduated with bachelor of arts and
masters of arts degrees in english literature from
NUS
 Boey Kim Cheng
• Boey's works are highly regarded by both the
academic and writing communities in Singapore.

• His own sense of restlessness about life in Singapore

is reflected prevalently in his poems.

• According to him, Singapore's rapid growth and

swift economic success are achieved at a cost.

• Feelings of displacement and disconnection with the

past occurred precisely because places where one
experienced his or her sense of belonging, through
their childhood are fast disappearing.
 Poems
• Somewhere-bound, (1989)

• Another Place, (1992)

• Days of No Name, (1996)

• Losing Alexandria, (Giramondo, 2003)

• Calling the Poems Home, (2004)

• Plum Blossom or Quong Tart at the QVB, (2005

• After the Fire: New and selected poems, (2006)

• Report to Wordsworth, (Unknown Date)

 ‘Report To Wordsworth’
by Boey Kim Cheng
You should be here, Nature has need of and Neptune lies helpless as beached as a
you. whale,

She has been laid waste. Smothered by the while insatiate man moves in for the kill.
smog,
Poetry and piety have begun to fail,
the flowers are mute, and the birds are few
As Nature’s mighty heart is lying still.
in a sky slowing like a dying clock.
O see the widening in the sky,
All hopes of Proteus rising from the sea
God is labouring to utter his last cry.
have sunk; he is entombed in the waste

we dump. Triton’s notes struggle to be

free,

his famous horns are choked, his eyes are

dazed,
 Reports to wordsworth

• In “Report to Wordsworth” Boey Kim Cheng powerfully conveys deep

feelings about human destruction of the natural world.

• Personifies nature in line two: “She has been laid waste”. Shows how
personal nature is to us and introduces the destructive actions of man over
nature almost suggesting rape of the land now without nutrients.

• Moves into a listing frenzy of the destruction of nature. “the flowers

are mute.” Read together with “the birds are few” Chang could be
referring to the loss of musical reality in nature.

• The poet’s sibilance in the simile “… a sky slowing like a dying clock”
suggests the almost rhythmical deliberate destruction of nature by
man.
 Form

• As a result of the “waste we dump” the sea-god is “choked” and

“dared”. This ends the octet which adopted the lament in the pattern
of ABAB CDCD. The pattern could suggest his singular thought out
position of how man is destructive that even the gods are affected. It
could show that we have power over nature.

• The third last line of the sonnet carries the sad words “Nature’s
mighty heart is lying still.” She alludes to nature’s power” mighty
heart” but immediately contrasts it with the euphemism for death
“lying still”. Up to here the rhythm and pace of the poem
“ABABCDCDEFEF” has been rising as if it is a high pitched lament.