This short piece will not do for Eavan Boland what Randall Jarrell did for Robert Frost or what Boland herself did for Sylvia Plath in her essay collection A Journey with Two Maps. It will not rescue a different Eavan Boland overlooked or ignored by critics. Its ambition is laughably much smaller. As I re-read her New Collected Poems in order to write this tribute, I was struck by the consistencies in the long and well-known course of this poet’s development. What were they? The high-mindedness, for one. For another, the tolerance of ambiguity. For a third, the feeling for others’ suffering. These were the qualities that first drew me to her poetry, and that still engage me.

And so I thought I would write about the great help Eavan Boland gives me, a gay Singapore poet, in resisting and re-­envisioning a patriarchal and colonial literary heritage. Now that would be a suitably weighty subject for a tribute. But as Boland has taught me to ask, what gives me my sense of what is suitable and what not? Whose dictates and decorum am I obeying? So, flipping back and forth in the book, I began to entertain a somewhat impertinent question: does Eavan Boland have a sense of humour?

Of course I mean in the poetry, having met the person only for a minute in the dazed atmosphere of a poetry reading. And I am happy to report after a conscientious search that in the tome of New Collected Poems there is at least one poem that induces a case of the funnies. For that reason, if ...