ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the trope of walking in Boey Kim Cheng's poetry. It explains links forged between walking, remembering, and writing. The chapter discusses the key issues such as the transformative power of time and space, loss and continuity, "company and converse", the equivocal nature of home. Boey Kim Cheng's 2006 collection of new and selected poems, After the Fire, brings together work from his three earlier volumes and twenty-one new poems. The poem's emotional impact springs in part from the kind of man being remembered. In negotiating his "favourite circuit", Boey's father is drawn in particular to the Civic District. By the time he is at secondary school, and "a teenage nomad after school hours", Boey can claim to have his own pathways along with his father's old circuit. It is also at the British Council Library that Boey first comes across Seamus Heaney's work.
