POET Alvin Pang was attending the Perth Festival as a featured poet early last year when he was approached by none other than leading Australian writer, editor and critic John Kinsella.

'I'd already known of him - he is just one step below Ted Hughes in terms of being famous,' says Pang, 35, of Kinsella, who has published over 30 books and is the founding editor of international literary journal Salt. 

'But I was surprised that he knew of us, that he knew of me. We shared a reading and we got to talking, and he said we should do a book of Australian and Singaporean poetry. And I am not going to say no to John Kinsella.'

The result of that encounter Down Under is Over There: Poems From Singapore And Australia, published this month by local publishing house Ethos Books.

It features 50 Australian poets and 25 local ones, though each country gets an equal page count. It has an initial print run of 1,000 copies, and is being distributed in Australia by Inbooks, a major Sydney-based distributor.

Ironically - or perhaps, suitably - Pang put together part of the Singapore section of Over There while he was abroad. In August last year, his wife Leiying, an officer with the Ministry of Education's Gifted Education branch, went to pursue her master's in education at the University of Virginia in the United States.

Pang, a self-described house-husband whose job as a 'permanent part-time editor' allows him to work from home and gives him time to write, went along to take care of their 21/2-year-old daughter, Thessaly. He has edited public policy journal Ethos - no relation to the publisher - for the past two years.

He says editing Singaporean poems while in the US made him more aware of what writing about Singapore involved.

'I was a lot more conscious of what made Singapore a territory, a country, a nation; what was interesting or different; how we were not like other people. It sharpened the contradiction of what we aspire to be and what we are,' says Pang, who returned to Singapore in September.

The former teacher, civil servant and journalist is well-known as a champion of local literature. He had already co-edited two poetry anthologies before this one: No Other City (2000) and Love Gathers All: The Philippines-Singapore Anthology Of Love Poetry (2002).

A long-time mentor with the Creative Arts Programme, he also helped organise Wordfeast, an international poetry festival held here in 2004. For his efforts over the past decade, he received a National Youth Award this year.

It is a little surprising, then, when he reveals that he is actually not all that interested in being a literary activist.

'I am a writer first, and everything else is secondary. I like to tell people it is like being a racecourse driver: You just want to drive fast cars,' he says.

'But there is no infrastructure, no racecourse, no highway. In order to facilitate the driving, you have to be involved in building the infrastructure, and that's what the activism is about. I benefit and other people benefit.'

That's not to say that putting together the anthology was a chore for Pang, who has published two collections of his own poetry. The list of Singapore poets reads like a who's who of the home-grown literary scene, from stalwarts like Lee Tzu Pheng to newcomers like Ng Yi-Sheng.

But what excited Pang most was that the poems submitted were fresh - almost all were written within the last three years, with only a few older ones, like Edwin Thumboo's May 1954, included for context.

'I didn't put them in for the sake of putting in famous poets. Everyone had written something new. In other words, this is a record of what has been written in Singapore by published writers of a certain standard in the past two to three years,' he says, noting that the same is largely the case on the Australian side.

That is also why some well-known names are not on the roll. 'Arthur Yap passed away, and Alfian Sa'at hasn't written much poetry lately, so I didn't put them in even though they are important,' he says.

While he sees anthologies as valuable snapshots of a culture or community at a given point in time, he cautions against canonising them.

'I actually have mixed feelings about anthologies being used as textbooks. On the one hand, it is good that the work is looked at more closely. On the other hand, there generally ought to be an awareness that this is a product of its time, a period piece,' he says.

'It is not scripture: It is not meant to last forever, and its triumphs and its flaws are because of this.'

Over There ($35 without GST) is available at major bookstores.