It’s something I resisted for a few years after his death. Writing about him. Perhaps it’s an awareness that I would be exploiting him, something I talk a great deal about in my writing classes — the ethics of writing about a dead person. I did write a poem about him before After the Fire, in Another Place. It was about meeting under very difficult circumstances after a long separation. In that poem, there is a lot of unresolved anger. He had a terrible life, ruled by oneiric urges. Always in debt, in trouble. I think part of me wanted him dead, so that the trouble would disappear for good.

And when he went, it was too late. I discovered how much I missed him. So perhaps the poems in After the Fire are a kind of atonement, wanting him back, and also connecting him with my children, with our story here in Sydney.

[...] 

The poems about my father and grandmother are attempts to memorialize them, to deal with their disappearance. It’s like giving myself a second chance, for me to see them, and they to see me, in the light of what has passed. With forgiveness. And love. You are afraid to lose them, the images, the very sense of who they are.

How does reading these extracts change the way you view this poem?

Read the full interview here:

https://www.cerisepress.com/01/03/a-sense-of-questing-kim-cheng-boey-on-poetry/view-all

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