In this new essay, Caleb Leow traces the different uses of the word ‘earth’ in the work of Theophilus Kwek and the ways in which the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ are necessarily folded into one another. Kwek’s poems, Leow argues, ask us to consider the layers of global history – both human and non-human – that underwrite the here and now, so that personal stories are always understood in relation to broader contexts of colonialism or environmental change. It’s not often that a poet’s work can be analysed through the use of a single word, but I think this essay – which combines close readings with broader overviews – demonstrates just how important the word ‘earth’ is to Kwek’s poetics. I hope you enjoy it.
Most poets have a verbal quirk. For Philip Larkin, it was the negative prefix: ‘Aubade’ alone includes ‘Unresting’, ‘unused’, ‘unfocused’, and ‘uncaring’, not to mention all the ‘nothings’ and ‘nots’ and ‘nos’. For the French symbolist Paul Verlaine, it was the use of prepositions that convey only a vague sense of place: words like vers, parmi, entre – near, among, amid – to name a few. For the Singaporean poet Theophilus Kwek, it’s the word earth. It appears in at least a quarter of the poems in his latest collection, Commonwealth. His previous collection, Moving House, tells the same story: in just ninety-six pages, there are more than thirty occurrences of the word earth.
Generally speaking, earth refers to one of two things: either the planet on which we live, or the literal earth beneath our feet, the dirt and soil and sod. In some ways, these are polar opposite definitions, at least in terms of scale: one macro, the other micro; one global, the other local. That Kwek habitually uses earth in the first sense, to refer to soil, should come as no surprise. After all, he’s often acknowledged the influence on his work of Seamus Heaney, perhaps the archetypal ‘earthy’ poet. Malcolm Jones, on Heaney’s (2000) translation of Beowulf, writes of a ‘muscular language so rich with the tones and smell of earth that you almost expect to find a few crumbs of dirt clinging to his lines.’ There’s an earthiness to Kwek’s poetry too, particularly in his depictions of pre-urban Singapore. In a poem from Moving House titled ‘The Gamble’ which depicts a childhood game called ‘Oh-yah-beh-yah-sohm’, the children are described as having ‘[n]ails rich and streaked with too much earth’. The tactile grittiness of this description is complemented with portrayals of a bygone Singapore: a ‘field of broken hurdles’, and a ‘parched track, grass beaten under’. There’s a rural version of Singapore that Kwek is trying to evoke here, a sort of earthy nostalgia neatly captured in that image of dirt under a child’s fingernail.
Kwek is certainly a poet of the local, but he uses the word earth in a planetary sense as well – an expansive poetic gesture which appears to stand in stark contrast to the seemingly localised subject matter of most of his poems. It seems to me that his poetry intentionally exploits the ambiguity inherent in the double-meaning of ‘earth’ in order to make the claim that the local and the global aren’t oppositional at all. There’s a lovely moment in ‘The Dance’, for example, where Kwek’s grandmother describes her porch as her ‘own piece of the earth’. Here, a small portion of ground comes to represent the whole planet – earth becomes metonymy for itself. As the family find her ‘wrist-deep, pulling up the bad grass’, her act of caring for a private plot of land seems to take on wider – even planetary – significance.
Kwek’s first three collections were published in Singapore: They Only Speak Our Mother Tongue (2011) and Giving Ground (2016) were published by the independent press Ethos Books, while Circle Line (2013) was published by the now-defunct Math Paper Press, a boutique publishing house that championed new literary voices in Singapore. Moving House (2020) and Commonwealth (2025), his two latest collections, are published with the UK-based Carcanet, though he remains closely involved in the Singapore poetry scene. There’s a pull in his writing between rootedness and rootlessness that feels familiar to me as a fellow Singaporean poet, as well as a consistent desire to understand how what we think of as the ‘local’ is always already a product of global forces. Such a preoccupation, I suspect, is borne out of an awareness of our island’s long history as a strategic port at the crossroads of global trade. In Kwek’s own words, Commonwealth was written to demonstrate how our ‘settled’ lives in this city may in fact be ‘underwritten by generations of change’.
Kwek’s work finds traces of the global everywhere. Take the title Commonwealth, for example, which refers at once to a neighbourhood in Singapore as well as to the wider Commonwealth of Nations, after which the former was named. Kwek reminds us just how much colonial history is inscribed within what we think of as the modestly local. Indeed, he goes even further back than British settlement in 1819, drawing inspiration from Singapore’s seven-century-long history in the wider Malay world — the epigraph to ‘Merah’, for example, is taken from Kwa Chong Guan, one of the leading historians of this longue durée approach to Singapore history. Kwek homes in on the historically specific, only to unearth the sedimentary layers of global history that form the here and now.
To return to Kwek’s use of earth: we can think of the word as, among other things, the ideal crutch word for a poet of the local trying to get his readers to think, feel or imagine beyond the immediate context of a poem. Take ‘Forty Days’, which depicts the relocation of the Sri Thandavaalam Muneeswaran Alayam shrine – a small Hindu shrine built by workers of Malaysian train operator Keretapi Tanah Melayu (KTM) more than three decades ago. Its presence on state land was judged illegal in late 2016 and the shrine’s cooperation was given forty days to vacate.
The poem begins almost claustrophobically as Kwek details the strenuous task of relocation, enacted through the cramming of detail into a single sentence: the ‘forty days of joining hands / for the tricky climb down the flyover // picking their way with the light of a phone’. Again, there’s a sort of nostalgic earthiness to the poem’s descriptions of ‘this soft crook of the soil’ and the ‘hunched grasses’ which ‘paint large strokes with the sun’. But the poem ends on a dizzyingly expansive note: the workers detect ‘a voice like a small spring singing’ as it ‘comes, closer, […] full of rain and thunder’. Listen to the storm, the last line implores us, ‘hear it sway the earth again’. The word earth functions here as a portal for the imagination, almost uprooting us from the detailed world of the poem as we feel ourselves being swept up by a much grander scale of movement and change.
But earth is mobilised throughout Commonwealth for more than stylistic or rhetorical effect: it also works to de-center human histories, evoking primal geographies that are set against human acts of creation and destruction. In a central sequence dedicated to the Bukit Ho Swee fire of 1961 – a deeply personal historical event that forced Kwek’s own family to relocate – Kwek imagines his grandfather’s house and possessions as ‘singed into the earth’ (‘Zinc’). Yet in the following part of the sequence, ‘Pasar’, a pastor tells an anecdote of his shoe ‘swallowed by the earth before all this land // was piled firm enough’. Here, the word earth points both backwards and forwards: to a land untouched by human development, but also to a planet that will continue to exist even after the destruction of human landmarks.
More specifically, in several place-poems, the word earth is used to convey Kwek’s ambivalent attitudes towards urban development: a road is a ‘seam / of earth scabbed over’ (‘Commonwealth’); a demolished cemetery is ‘rough earth’ that ‘[n]othing will […] pave over’ (‘Road Works’); and Jalan Besar (Malay for big or wide road) is a ‘mark’ left upon the earth (‘Jalan Besar’). The almost anthropomorphic language used to characterise the effects of these human developments – the earth is ‘singed’ and ‘scabbed over’ – hints at a budding concern with the destruction wrought on the planet by human civilisation. The planet’s non-human animals, by contrast, seem to offer an alternative model of existence. In ‘Parable of Feet and Wings’, the ephemerality of human empire is contrasted with the persistence of ant colonies (‘nothing lasts in these parts / except what takes to the earth unseen’), whose continual survival is guaranteed by the flying ants that ‘each season / leave earth behind, and yet are there’. Alternative histories can be floral too: in ‘Psalm for a pandemic’, nature grows untamed without human intervention: ‘As hair gone uncut, the whole earth thickens’. That plants might provide a different understanding of time is even more evident in ‘Corridor’, which begins by discussing how
The raintree’s dance takes lifetimes, years
longer than our music, passing in quick step,
is sovereign to itself, oblivious
of events.
The eponymous corridor in this poem refers to the old train tracks owned by KTM which were closed in 2011 and converted into a walking path and a nature reserve. The slow but steady growth of raintrees, ‘oblivious’ of the station’s closure, offers a contrast between the rapid changes in our human landscapes on the one hand and the endurance of nature on the other. Here we have a celebration not just of nature’s resilience, but of its restorative power too: ‘we walk, with accustomed ease, / our joy is the joy of the trees’.
The overall effect achieved by these disparate uses of the word earth, I would argue, is a powerful relativisation of human history itself. This is not to deny the emotional potency of Kwek’s poems, which intimately chart stories of loss, change, and displacement. But as the frequency of a word like earth suggests, Kwek ultimately allows such histories to be absorbed into wider cycles of creation and destruction that transcend individual human lives. This is most clearly demonstrated in the poem ‘Pearl Bank’, which laments the destruction of its titular apartment blocks, yet closes by asserting that:
[…] something new must come.
There will be rain again, and rain over
the earth, till another grain
sleeps, wakes, becomes a pearl.
There is perhaps some playful irony in the image of a new ‘pearl’ taking the place of the old: the Pearl Bank apartments were succeeded by the uncreatively-named One Pearl Bank condominium in 2019 – plus ça change, etc. More noteworthy, however, is the way the word earth allows for the erasure of human agency in the poem. We are invited to imagine the demolition of one building and the erection of another as some sort of inevitable natural process, rather than the conscious work of human hands. This sort of affective movement is common in Kwek’s poetry: mourning the loss of the local on its own terms, before situating such changes within almost universal cycles of loss and gain. I’m thinking here of Wordsworth’s poem ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, where the deceased Lucy is ‘[r]olled round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks and stones and trees.’ Like in Kwek’s poetry, it is ‘earth’s diurnal course’ that allows Wordsworth to move beyond personal tragedy by considering planetary scales of time and space which far outweigh the human.
Ultimately, Kwek relativises the local not to trivialise but to dignify it. I’m reminded of Patrick Kavanagh’s poem ‘Epic’, which asks if we should pay any attention to the local when things around us always seems to be dwarfed by great historical events. Yet the poem ends with the ghost of Homer reminding us that even The Iliad was made from a ‘local row’. Kwek’s poetry, through its use of the dual meaning of earth, invites a similar honouring of the local. With an attentive enough eye, Kwek suggests, we might find the history of the globe nestled within a single plot of earth.
This essay was published on October 19, 2025.
Caleb Leow is a poet from Singapore. His writing has appeared in Oxford Poetry, The London Magazine, and berlin lit. His debut pamphlet, The Hoarders, is out with Smith|Doorstop.
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