SOURCE: “The Poetry of Edwin Thumboo: A Study in Development,” in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 24, No. 2, Autumn, 1984, pp. 454-59.

In the following essay, Singh and Eng trace Thumboo's poetic development, contending that “many of the qualities which gave the initial poems their power and their beauty continue to manifest themselves in his latest work.”

It is always difficult to study the process by which a poet develops, because the development is never wholly linear. Preoccupations which may largely be the centre of later work are often anticipated in the beginning: the creative impulse may undergo important modifications but it usually retains some distinctive trait which harks back to the earliest work. In this respect the poetry of Edwin Thumboo (b. 1933) is remarkably characteristic of an engaging, almost instinctive, continuity of theme and technique. He has been writing poetry for more than twenty-five years now, and many...