Commonwealth

Reviews / Votes

'His poems are keenly aware that the scariest place to exist is on the edges of a space, but the stately, serene pacing should not blind you to the keen political intelligence at work.'
Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian 'Kwek's lyrical and imagistic treatment of historical episodes in Commonwealth is skilled and his epiphanies offer an uncommon lucidity. The poems read like grand allegories of displacement and relocation, and form a fine suite of place poems that will resonate with the experience of urban change beyond its slim plot of land.'

Shawn Hoo, The Straits Times 'Drawing from research archives, memoirs, interviews and historical texts, this book charts with lyrical sensitivity the global echoes of human geography.'

Jennifer Wong, The Poetry Review 'With both sweeping vision and technical precision, Kwek's poetry does what prose cannot - steeping the reader in the textured nuance of history, re-animating the narratives told to us by the powers that be, conjuring memory not as static record but living presence... Commonwealth is proof that our heritage can be made and re-made through language - the memory of these spaces lingering in his verses long after skyline has shifted.'

Jasmine Goh, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore 'Theophilus Kwek's Commonwealth is a feat of the expansiveness of daily observations, of the necessity of writing amidst a country's constant reconstruction.'

Tim Tim Cheng, Hong Kong Review of Books 'Commonwealth mutates with decades, absorbing the urban, and wryly resisting the reshaping of memory. The book serves as a 'documentary' in poetry.'

Shilpa Dikshit Thapliyal, Journal of Practice, Research and Tangential Activities 'Kwek homes in on the historically specific, only to unearth the sedimentary layers of global history from the here and now.'

Caleb Lowe, And Other Poems