SINGAPORE – The late poet Mervin Mirapuri had published only a single book of poems in his lifetime and might have been erased from Singapore’s literary history – if not for a stack of manuscripts he left on his wife’s bedside in his last days.

With the posthumous publication of A Walk With My Pig (2023), an epic poem written between 2005 and 2011 that runs close to 100 pages, Mirapuri’s family – who emigrated to Australia in 1988 – is hoping to give him a poetic homecoming.

His elder daughter Dawn, 56, tells The Straits Times on a recent family visit to Singapore: “I knew in my heart it had to be published in Singapore.”

She had approached Singapore publisher Pagesetters, which launched the book recently at the George Town Literary Festival in Penang, and in Singapore.

Mirapuri has been dubbed a “lost son of Singapore” by literary critic Gwee Li Sui, who painstakingly reconstructed the poem from six drafts and conversations with his family to decipher the cryptic scribbles and marks on his manuscripts.

Mirapuri, who died of lung cancer in 2020 at age 74, was the author of Eden 22 (1974), which was put out by Woodrose Publications. He co-founded Woodrose with fellow poet Chandran Nair, who died in September 2023.

He is of the generation of Singapore poets born in the 1940s which include Nair, Arthur Yap, Lee Tzu Pheng and Wong May, who also received a homecoming of sorts in 2023 when her first book of poems, A Bad Girl’s Book Of Animals (1969), was reissued by Ethos Books.

This book is his magnum opus and represents a distinctive break from those who know him from his Singapore poems, says Dr Gwee.

“He became a very different poet when he moved to Australia. His voice changed completely. He’s this very absorbent poet and the experiences all fed into his technique.”

A Walk With My Pig originated in an e-mail his daughter Dawn sent him when she made a conference trip across the Israeli checkpoint to the West Bank in 2005, as part of her research with the American University at Cairo in Arab women’s writing in English.

Dawn had shared her outrage at the suffering of the Palestinians with her father, and Mirapuri had replied – as he was wont to do – with an untitled poem that eventually became an integral part of the final poem.

She says: “Those initial blocks of words responded to some of those things – being in Jerusalem, seeing this injustice, just that whole juxtaposition of universes clashing, that there were different people living under different conditions. All of those truths were in that one place.”

The book, which Dr Gwee says in his introduction can be understood as an “expression of a frustrated new Australian”, is also witness to the forms of discrimination like ageism and racism Mirapuri faced at that point in his life.

Because of Mirapuri’s attention to world issues and his migrant journey, there is a worldliness to the book that seems fitting for this globalised and connected age.

His younger daughter Ann, 52, says Mirapuri used to call her and her siblings “children of the universe”, and laughs at how there were always “bits of poetry in the air” with her father.

His wife Elizabeth, 81, says: “We’re all citizens of the world now. We care for people in Gaza and all around the world. We need kindness – that’s all we need – and respect.”

The couple also have a son, Tristan, 50.

Although Mirapuri’s life was split between Singapore and Australia, Dawn says: “At his very core, there was a proud Singaporean – and then he was a very proud Australian too. And there was no tension in that whatsoever.”

There are other unpublished manuscripts in the family’s possession – but the one closest to his wife’s heart is a personal book of love poems handwritten for her.

Elizabeth recalls that she fell in love with Mirapuri after he showed her some of his poems. “He always wrote with a fountain pen and never with a ballpoint pen. His shirts used to be stained because the ink would leak.”

While she has never shown these love poems to anyone, she takes it out during the interview and says she might now consider publishing the book, poignant about the passage of time. “I might do it now because the writing is fading.”

Mervin Mirapuri’s A Walk With My Pig ($19) is available from Ethos Books’ website (ethosbooks.com.sg/products/a-walk-with-my-pig)