ABSTRACT
This chapter indicates something of the importance of Wong May's poetry in the contexts both of Singapore and literature globally. It is difficult to estimate the degree to which Singapore informs the Wong's poetry, particularly when the very notion of "Singaporeanness" remains unclear, contested as does ever more genuinely cosmopolitan Singapore's inhabitants' investment in that notion. In 1967, David Ormerod published his anthology of Singaporean and Malaysian verse, A Private Landscape. The volume included several early poems by Wong May, including "The Saw-dust". In another local anthology, The Flowering Tree, Edwin Thumboo included Wong's "Preparation", "Dragon-fly", and "Study of a Millionairess". In his introduction to The Second Tongue, Thumboo appreciatively engages with a poem from Wong's first post-Singapore collection A Bad Girl's Book of Animals, "Summer Guide", the uncertainty is made specific. Picasso's Tears, was published in 2014, signalling a return to publication 36 years after Wong's previous collection, Superstitions.
