'Eileen Chong’s new collection continues her exploration of the contemplative and the personal within subtly shifting contexts of food, love, history and culture. Lovers of her poetry will find much that is familiar and much that is new. Over the three volumes of work represented on this page the reader can map a transition from a precocious apprenticeship to a mature voice, through moments of light and happiness mixed with hints of grief and foreboding.
'As always her technical confidence and linguistic sophistication allow her to offer poems which appear simple on the surface, transparent enough to appreciate at a first reading and yet which contain depths and resonances which repay repeated attention and thought. Through this combination of beauty and depth, Eileen Chong commands a wide and devoted following.' (Publication summary)
'In his short story ‘A Little Ramble’, champion of the anti-heroic Robert Walser says, ‘We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much’. In her third collection, Painting Red Orchids, Singaporean Australian Eileen Chong testifies to ordinary experience as the sensory and emotional kaleidoscope of the individual. These are the lyrical portraits of a perpetual itinerant, her introverted recordings of private joys, loneliness and fascination with solitary journeying through a rich inner world. Sensorial and intellectual curiosity abound in her peripatetic wanderings any place and any time: Sydney’s Chinatown, Parramatta, the seaside, the Australian goldfields, Tang dynasty China, a friend’s kitchen.' (Introduction)
'In his short story ‘A Little Ramble’, champion of the anti-heroic Robert Walser says, ‘We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much’. In her third collection, Painting Red Orchids, Singaporean Australian Eileen Chong testifies to ordinary experience as the sensory and emotional kaleidoscope of the individual. These are the lyrical portraits of a perpetual itinerant, her introverted recordings of private joys, loneliness and fascination with solitary journeying through a rich inner world. Sensorial and intellectual curiosity abound in her peripatetic wanderings any place and any time: Sydney’s Chinatown, Parramatta, the seaside, the Australian goldfields, Tang dynasty China, a friend’s kitchen.' (Introduction)
