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When the Barbarians Arrive
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When the Barbarians Arrive

by Alvin Pang

Arc International Poets

Part of our Arc International Poets series

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

At the World's Festival, Norwich June 2012:

Alvin's appearance at the Slovenian "Days of Wine and Poetry" festival in 2010:

ISBN 978-1906570-98-9 (pbk), 978-1906570-99-6 (hbk), 978-1908376-33-6 (ebk)
Size: 216 x 138 mm
Pages: 96
Published July 2012

» About Alvin Pang