Travel - Marc Nair

Undulations: The Toronto Launch

After launching at Book Bar in November 2025 in conversation with my erstwhile editor and publisher Jeremy Fernando, I’m excited to formally launch Undulations in Toronto! In the depths of winter, no less. Come for an invigorating convesation with writer and musician Jacqueline Chia and listen as I read some of the poems and talk about my wider practice with photography and poetry.

RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/book-launch-marc-nair-tickets-1977773508805

Meanwhile, here are some thoughts on the book and on this dialogic process between text and image that continues to fascinate.

Undulations began as a way of listening.

Point Reyes, with its cliffs dissolving into fog and its estuaries breathing with the tide, offered not only vistas but conversations—whispers of wind through cypress, the long hush of the Pacific, the voices of people who once walked these paths and those who continue to live in relation to this place.

To stand in such a landscape is to be reminded that the land itself is never still. It shifts, bends, recedes, advances—always undulating. The self is also undulating, a major life shift, a leap from Singapore to Canada. Maybe that’s why part of me resonated so much with Point Reyes.

Photography, for me, is the first act of attention. A photograph asks to stop and hold still what is in motion. It is a way of recognizing that something ephemeral—the way light drapes itself across a dune, the way tule elk pause against the horizon—can be gathered, if only briefly.

The meanings of photographs are never fixed, are not contained solely within the photographs themselves. They are read against a viewer’s own lived experience and rely on a combination of the viewer’s sensitivity, knowledge and understanding as well as the specific context in which the image is seen.

This is where poetry enters. Writing is a second listening, a return to the same moment but with a different ear. The poem asks what the image does not reveal: What does it mean to walk here, to dwell in a landscape layered with histories of ranching, migration, erasure, and resilience? How do we read geography not as a backdrop, but as an active partner in memory and imagination?

The dialogic practice of pairing poems with photographs became a way of inhabiting both silence and speech. Together, they produced a rhythm of call and response, each form extending what the other could not hold alone. But neither can be too complex, otherwise they will become too difficult to exist relationally and demand their own spaces.

Roy’s Redwood Preserve from Undulations (2025)

Chinese Makars, a 2016 book by Robert Crawford of contemporary Scottish responses to Chinese poets paired with photographs by Norman McBeath contains a ‘Photopoetry Manifesto’ which identifies aspects of their shared practice:

Photopoetry is more interesting and engaging when the photograph is not a literal illustration of the poem; and vice versa
Both poem and photograph should be able to stand alone in their own right.
The pairing of poem and photograph should bring more depth, so each gains something from the collocation.
The pairing should allow for serendipity. This is partly to do with the process of choosing which pairings to make, and partly due to the power of the pairing to excite.
Within a set of pairings there should be a range of connective strands: again like a relationship, where there are lots of different facets of attraction and at the same time a deep consistency.

This dialogic rhythm guided the structure of Undulations: not as a linear account of Point Reyes, but as a constellation of meditations—on the people encountered, the land observed, and the intimate negotiations between presence and absence.

In shaping the book, I came to see this dialogue as more than aesthetic—it was also philosophical. Landscape photography often risks objectifying place, turning it into scenic cliches. Poetry risks the opposite: dissolving place into metaphor, which isn’t bad in and of itself, but could end up becoming too insular. By allowing each form to question and counterbalance the other, I sought to honor Point Reyes as both material and mysterious, as a geography that resists simplification. The undulating coastlines became a metaphor not just for the land, but for the practice itself—an ongoing oscillation between seeing and saying, between external witness and internal reflection.

Weaving in and around this is also the life-sized undulations that Carolyn and I have experienced in the year or so since we moved from Singapore to Canada, a leap from one continent to another, a wrenching, a displacement.

Ultimately, Undulations is not just a portrait of Point Reyes but an invitation to think with it.
The photographs ask: what is here?
The poems ask: what remains after we see?
Together, they trace how the geography of a place becomes a geography of thought, reminding us that to encounter landscape is also to encounter ourselves—unfixed, shifting, and always in motion.

A Secret Chord

We (Carolyn, Graham Norton the kitty cat and I) recently spent a week in Montreal and the Eastern Townships.

We took the VIA rail from Union Station, which gave us a (too) slow, scenic experience. The train ride tacked on an extra two hours each way! Apparently, the tracks were too hot to travel at speeds greater than 50km/h. The train’s speed topped out at about 140km/h, but really only for brief stretches, and mostly in the shade. North America and trains…

Montreal introduced itself to us with wide boulevards, a pleasing mélange of architecture and sparsely populated restaurants amidst the thirsty edge of a heatwave.

Our hotel was close to Chinatown, all two blocks of it, a tidy agglomeration of East Asian cuisine.

Internet research threw up some choice neighbourhoods to explore, and so we took the metro

(very nice and comfortable, Toronto, are you taking notes?) to Mile End, which can best be described as hipster, when hipster was still a term being used. In essence, fashionably dated. We walked through residential streets to find donuts, ice cream, bagels and a cute Japanese paper shop.

Verdun was another hyped-up neighbourhood that we visited. Its largely known for its beach, which was more of a sad-eyed concrete promenade by the St Lawrence River that morphed into a narrow path dotted with abandoned tents for the unhoused.

Its main shopping street, pegged between La Salle and Verdun metro stations, felt vague, vacillating between overpriced restaurants, dollar stores and ambiguous attempts at street art. ‘Try too hard’ is the Singaporean phrase that springs to mind.

All this while, over the city, the visage of Leonard Cohen looms, his music suffusing streets with gravelly possibilities, shadows of melodies played but never fully known and maybe, Montreal is that apotheosis as a city; caught between the cosmopolitanism of Toronto and the French-forwardness of Quebec.

The drive out to the Eastern Townships was mostly on Highway 10, a winding highway that led us quickly out of the city limits into open, prairie-like farmland with various small mountains massing in the distance. After the dense brush and relatively flat terrain of Ontario, the undulation was most pleasing. Hiking up the hills was not on the cards, however, but we did get in a number of hikes and made our way through a few small towns that, to be honest, promised more than they delivered.

The cat was intrigued, but not overly impressed

Essentially, the Eastern Townships is cottage country for the Quebecois, who speak French strangely, aren’t that friendly and generally tolerate visitors insofar as they pump tourist dollars to the local businesses.

We stayed in a cute Airbnb in Orford, which is a central base for exploring the region. On our way there, we passed through Knowlton, which has a few historic buildings and the Knowlton Pub, where we inhaled a rather heavy serving of poutine and local stout. In fact, we made a point to drink from local microbreweries throughout the trip, and they did not disappoint! Quebec’s beer might even have the edge over Ontario in its complexity and stopping power.

Believe or not, this is poutine! Well, the Knowlton Pub version of it

We walked along the Cherry River, just a short stroll from our AirBnb, drove to Marais de la Rivière aux Cerises for a very germane hike and popped over to nearby Magog (what a throwback Biblical name!) for supplies from a well-stocked Metro.

Artwork along the Cherry River

It rained for a whole day, so we had to adjust our plans to spend more time in Magog. But when the skies cleared, we drove north to Sherbrooke, which is the largest town in the Eastern Townships. Its more sprawl than anything. The main streets seemed pretty rundown, although a bunch of spread-out murals, which tried to depict the history of the town, was a laudable attempt at encouraging footfall. Still, parts of the town felt pretty rundown and almost unsafe. That being said, we had a classic fast food lunch at Louis Luncheonette, a local chain with affordable prices and mountains of fries. Bois Beckett Park, on the north of Sherbrook town, was an absolutely lovely park to walk in and was well worth the drive.

On our last day, the sun came out and we drove to the Abbaye de Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, a Benedictine abbey established by a group of exiled monks from France in 1912. Overlooking Lake Memphremagog, the building, which is modern and quite beautiful, beckoned from a distance. But we couldn’t access the grounds and so we were mostly confined to a well-stocked gift shop that brimmed with local cider, jam and cheeses. I guess monks, too, have to make a living.

Other notable highlights worth a mention: slumming the opening of the Montreal Jazz Festival and catching up with friends over sangria with such eclectic conversation topics like making paint from rocks.

As we get older, it becomes less and less about the bucket list and more about filling smaller containers with these memories, that can be made only in particular seasons of our lives. Also, one can’t always haul around the bucket, but there’s always room on the shelf for one more glass jar.