City Of Rain

On CITY OF RAIN

One of Singapore’s most visible poets, Pang grows with each book. In his poems we hear a voice unhurried, confident, and capable of carrying diverse humors, and read a rhetoric shaded to ironies, surprising us with glimpses of contemporary experience that affirm yet mock, celebrate and unsettle. His poetry adds a rich and complex presence to the critical mass of urban literature now fully emergent from Singapore. His poems, at once recognizably national and international in reach, offer a fresh edgy energy to this tradition.

Professor Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, 1992 and

author of Joss and Gold

CITY OF RAIN is elemental in its conception, framework and throughput, much like deliberate if delicate slivers of a grand downpour to end a heretofore parched season. This collection of poems slakes more than the primal thirst of a sere landscape that has been the urban quotidian.

Pang’s poetry goes beyond the customarily quiet, subtle negation of all things mundane. Indeed his truths and insights ‘set things right in the sequel,’ and prequel, let alone the continuum of calculation and miracle. Here his voice is trenchant, there it is droll — and all through the flood of salvation, ultimately is it visionary.

Alfred A. Yuson

Winner of the Southeast Asian WRITE Award, 1992 

Alvin Pang’s poems are direct, funny, heartbreaking, bossy, generous, and beautiful, full of paradoxes, logic, tantalizing illogic. They remind you what a pleasure wonderful writing is, and what a pleasure it is to be provoked.

Elizabeth McCracken

Granta 20 Best American Writers under 40

National Book Award (USA) Finalist, 1996

Alvin Pang, architect of urban and urbane poetry, builds lines as sleek and slender as a city of dreams upon the ground of ironic disposition. In the best poems of CITY OF RAIN, we are nudged gently into a deeper awareness of what is wounding in the microcosm of city life vis-à-vis the nostalgia or vision of another reality. A careful reading of Pang’s poetry sounds the undertow of desires against the darker registers of ennui and death.

Marjorie M. Evasco-Pernia

De La Salle University, Philippines

Two-time Winner of National Book Award for Poetry (Philippines)

Superman is powerless in the infernal city. Leaping over taller buildings is not enough. Manufactured symbols of identity are malign to the nation. Yet psychic growth can be uncovered from technology. WORDS have identities. The poet uses them expansively like Whitman to describe the terrain and then minimally to expand the spaces of the imagination.

Peter Nazareth

Professor of English and African-American World Studies &

Advisor to the International Writing Program

University of Iowa (USA)

In his CITY, Alvin Pang presents himself as a poet of paradox, poking around in rubble, assembling a delightful bric-a-brac of things and images playful, sad, ironical, recalcitrant; with each line, declaring, quite convincingly, that his is a ‘city’ of the world and he its clearest voice.

Eddin Khoo

Poet, Translator, & Journalist (Malaysia)

© Alvin Pang, 2010

First published in 2003

Revised edition 2010

ISBN: 978-981-08-4731-9 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-981-14-1211-0 (E-Book) 

Published under the imprint Ethos Books

by Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd

28 Sin Ming Lane #06-131

Singapore 573972

URL: www.ethosbooks.com.sg

All rights reserved. Except for quotatin of short passages for the purpose of review and criticism, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Excerpt from Invisible Cities by Itala Calvio, copyright © 1972 by Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., English translation by William Weaver copyright © 1974 by Harcourt, Inc., reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

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