Some of these poems deal with loss and absence. Could you tell us more about your relationship with your father and grandmother?

It is hard to go into it again, after having presented so much of my father in my book of essays Between Stations. 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.

Between Stations has an essay devoted to my grandmother. She looked after me and my sister after my dad left, and my mother had to fend for herself. She was a nourishing presence, comforting, always there to sort out family problems, and always cooking, feeding us. A rather sad life but I will always remember the comfort of being close to her, her unstinting, untiring love for us and all her children. We forget what the earlier generations went through, the Japanese Occupation, the hardships before and after it if you didn’t belong to the moneyed classes. There is tremendous strength, and spirit of endurance, to take what Fate dealt out. Shakespeare sums it up beautifully at the end of King Lear: “The old hath borne most. We that are young/Shall never see so much, nor live so long.” I guess the poems commemorate that. They also stem from the guilt of not being there, in her final days.

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.

Let me quote from your poem “Change Alley”: “Only an echo / remains, the man haunting and sniffing / where the Alley had been, measuring / its absence till the spirit of place returns, / till a door yields at the end and he walks / out free, changed beyond all changes.” In mid-decade, you left Singapore and moved to Sydney. What was the local writing scene like during that time, and how do you view things now, from afar?

I don’t feel qualified enough to comment on the writing scene at that time or now. I have never been part of, active or visible in literary circles. When Somewhere-Bound came out, I turned down a few requests for interviews. At that time, poetry and spirituality were inextricable for me. I had to protect my solitude, and practise in poetry the self-renunciation that I admired in Hopkins, Merton, etc. Perhaps it was a bit of youthful arrogance too, that I could better forge my way, apart from the crowds. Besides, there wasn’t much that I was drawn to. Rilke, Heaney, Edward Thomas, Katzantzakis were stronger voices and I listened. There is a marked difference now, of course. Much more being published, more of a scene, as they say. I think you worked mostly alone, if you were a poet in the ’80s or early ’90s, but now there is more of a community, networks of voices, publishing opportunities, grants, prizes. I wonder if poets these days are not looking for that aloneness that was in abundance back then.