'If you can be this sad, you can also be this happy.' There's no doubt of the intensity of the experiences Cyril Wong reflects in this, his fifth collection of poetry. The sadness is patent. But the happiness seems something hoped for, rather than achieved, except perhaps in the joy of expression, the joy of creating his work.

If the personality presented in each poem is one and the same, this book presents the only son of parents who wanted him to do well at school (a cane was used 'to whip my school grades into shape'), and who also wanted him to have children within a happy, Christian marriage. His father ceased talking to him 20 years ago, when he learnt more than he was ready to learn about his son's private life. Wong became alienated from his mother, because her hopes and expectations for his life jarred with his own desires. This work shows the pain of rejection, hope for acceptance, and the desire for a different version of happy love and domesticity.

Wong lives life on the three levels of body, mind and spirit. Simple actions such as cutting toenails or trimming sideburns lead him to consider other types of loss: the loss of loved ones and the personal dissolution that occurs at death. He reacts deeply to cultural manifestations and events broadcast through the international media. Heat responds to an exhibition about the Japanese occupation of Singapore during the second world war. That day is a moving narrative of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.

Personalities of high and popular world cultures appear: Baudelaire, Simone Weil, Maria Callas, Meryl Streep. Chinese and Indian religion, dance and music are presented with inward understanding. In Why I sing, Wong - an admired counter-tenor - describes his feeling that singing creates, 'enlightenment - respite,/ more like, even mercy - ' and his experience that singer and listeners meet, 'So far from what we are/ we find ourselves again.'

His mind is full of questions, which it seems he can never 'turn off ... like the lights in a living room'. Kissing Pope John Paul II's ring, as a boy, his mind urged the question, 'What about us?' Later, when he watched the news about this Pope's death, saw the pain in his eyes through his broadcast image, his question changed to, 'What about you?'

In these poems, the expressions of rebellion against a seemingly pre-ordained world order resemble those of the English romantic poets William Blake and A.C. Swinburne.

The book title is taken from the poem, Walls, loss of light, which interrogates the Creator about his purpose in creating man. The poet suggests that the Creator's 'singular purpose' was simply to create. Compared with such a work of creation, none of created man's achievements can be considered a success.

Wong's own creative and personal ambitions are expressed movingly and terribly in the inverted, unjustified, self-doubting, final statement of the book: 'If my self is a shadow, at least I made a dent in the light.' His work appears here as blank verse, free verse, poetic prose, a dramatic playlet and a series of poignant propositions.