Under the Canopy and other poems, which first came out in late 1998, was the first ever English-language collection of poems produced in Negara Brunei Darussalam. There is a very long tradition of writing poetry—especially sajak and ghazal and pantun—in Bahasa Melayu in Brunei Darussalam (for example, the epic Syair Awang Simawn), but here I was teaching English as a second, or in some cases a third language, and finding excellent English-language poetry written by non-native speakers. More significantly, they were informing and infusing their work with themes and imagery from their homeland, so as to make for a distinctive Bruneian poetry in English.
