When the Barbarians Arrive comprises poems from three published collections - Testing the Silence (1997), City of Rain (2003) and What Gives Us Our Names (2011) - together with a body of new and uncollected poems by one of Singapore's most exciting and visible poets of the post-1965 generation.
Ranging from unsentimental love poems to sharply satirical writing and audacious medleys, here are poems wry and shrewd, intelligent and sensitive, generous and playful, yet full of paradox; poems that pry, celebrate and unsettle.
This is Alvin Pang's first full-length UK publication.
[Pang's] 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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize 1992
Alvin Pang (冯啟明) is a poet, writer, editor, anthologist and translator. He was Singapore’s Young Artist of the Year for Literature in 2005 and received the Singapore Youth Award for Arts and Culture in 2007, and the JCCI Foundation Education Award in 2008.
His poems have been translated into over fifteen languages, and he has appeared in major festivals and publications worldwide. He is among only a handful of poets from Singapore to be listed in the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English (2nd Edition, 2013).
His books include City of Rain (2003), Other Things and Other Poems (Croatia, 2012) and When the Barbarians Arrive, published in the UK in 2012 by Arc. Most recently, he published a collection of selected and new works, What Happened: Poems 1997-2017 (2017). His collection of short prose, What Gives Us Our Names (2011), has sold more than 10,000 copies to date.
A Fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2002), he is a Board Member of the International Poetry Studies Institute, based in the University of Canberra. He is also a founding director of The Literary Centre – a non-profit initiative dedicated to interdisciplinary capacity, multilingual communication, and positive social change.
John Kinsella was born in Perth, Western Australia. His mother was a poet and he began writing poetry as a child. He cites Judith Wright among his early influences. Before becoming a full-time writer, teacher and editor he worked in a variety of places, including laboratories, a fertiliser factory and on farms.He has published over thirty books and his many awards include The Grace Leven Poetry Prize and the John Bray Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in journals such as Stand, The Times Literary Supplement, The Kenyon Review, and Antipodes. His poetry collections include: Poems 1980-1994; The Silo; The Undertow: New & Selected Poems; Visitants (1999); Wheatlands (with Dorothy Hewett, 2000); and The Hierarchy of Sheep (2001). His most recent book, Peripheral Light: New & Selected Poems, includes an introduction by Harold Bloom and his next poetry collection, The New Arcadia, was published in June 2005.Kinsella is a vegan and has written about the ethics of vegetarianism. IN 2001, he published a book of autobiographical writing called Auto. He has also written plays, short stories and the novel Genre. Kinsella has taught a Cambridge University where he is a Fellow Churchill College and was formerly Professor of English at Kenyon College, Ohio, where he was the Richard L Thomas Professor of Creative Writing in 2001.Kinsella is a founding editory of the literary journal Salt and international editor of The Kenhyon Review. He co-edited a special issue on Australian poetry for the American journal Poetry and various other issues of international journals. He is a poetry critic for The Observer.
