Author Description

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