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ABOUT A BOOK OF CHANGES (2016)
BY DARYL LIM WEI JIE
Change is what happens to everything: history is humanity's attempt to make sense of this inevitability. In his debut collection of poetry, Daryl Lim Wei Jie paints minute strokes that give way to panoramas, strewn with unusual asides: migrants crossing oceans; an ancient king reclaiming a throne; rivers clogged with corpses; the paperwork for an invasion; a milo dinosaur the height of Mount Everest. A Book of Changes is a young poet's attempt to make sense of the impossible ebb and flow of time.
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“In his arresting, enjoyable collection, Lim writes with maturity and humour but also a feeling of purposeful, searching honesty in Singapore’s current climate of not quite fear… A Book of Changes in its illumination of the present through democratised recovered voices and imaginings of present and past makes for a truly promising debut collection that signals both a healthy future and a decisive skip forward for Singapore poetry.”
— Dr Richard Angus Whitehead, Asiatic (Vol. 11, No. 1, June 2017)
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“Daryl Lim Wei Jie’s first collection of poetry, A Book of Changes—part of Math Paper Press’s Ten Year Series—wrangles between the interface of history-poetry and navigates this liminal time-space. It questions how we construe Singaporean histories and identity, and more than that, emphasises the processual qualities of its constructions. The reader experiences a retreat to a historical jungle, navigates to our concrete one today, while considering individual aspirations by ipping through the book. The collection adds nuance to the state-driven narrative of kampong to high-rise that is the backbone of how we were taught to understand Singapore.”
— Al Lim, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (Issue 41: “Writing Singapore”, September 2017)
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“A pretty incredible collection of poetry that I found simple in concept but sophisticated in execution. [The poet] treats history like the ghost it really is… It awakens the senses to the hidden wealth of innocuous spaces and the private histories of the bodies around us… Daryl implicates himself—or his poetic personas, at least—in this textual version of Singapore with no pretentious claims to authority, insight, or empathy. It’s poetry that makes you think with both head and heart.”
— Patricia Karunungan, co-editor of this is how you walk on the moon
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“Lim’s debut chapbook both discovers and disrupts Singapore history in assiduous fashion, pursuing and revitalising lost or receding voices to page-turning aplomb. The poet’s de-familiarisation of the otherwise recognisable images of the country not only deconstructs official narratives of the past but also invites readers to question their own position in the ever-changing present… the poems in A Book of Changes achieve their persuasive quality without being too heavy-handed. Published before a fiery debate took place between a historian and a minister on the state’s justification for Operation Coldstore in 2018, and public criticism of the 2019 Singapore Bicentennial for its celebration of colonial history, Lim’s writing even seems prescient. In marrying the quotidian with the eccentricities of Singaporean life, and staging anachronisms amid modernity, Lim provokes a reflection on the country’s state of perpetual change, and the personal and national histories lost along the way.
— Wong Yang, review in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal