Lee Tzu Pheng has won numerous awards for her poetry, including the Cultural Medallion (1985) and the SEA Write Award (1987). Other awards include the Gabriela Mistral Award from the Republic of Chile and the Montblanc-NUS Centre for the Arts Literary Award. Three of her poetry collections won the NBDCS Book Award for English poetry and her poems have been read over the BBC and set to music for choral performance. She published three new books in 2012: _Catching Connections_, _Short Circuits_ and _Sing a Song of Mankind_. Intro: MacRitchie Reservoir is a place of contrasts for me. As landscape, it is neatly laid out and peaceful. From any vantage point however, looking across the water, one sees the forested area on the edges and fringes and these present a mysterious and secretive look. What is within the forest bordering a large part of the reservoir is typically tropical, dense with trees and undergrowth, full of the sounds of the insects and other hidden forest life, and always humid. The forest flow is thickly carpeted with decaying leaves, twigs and branches as well as ferns and other low shrubs. This sense of fecund, hidden life pervades my sense of this place. The other phase of it is order and calm. Water itself is a symbol both of life and death, and it is fitting that this place calls up these fascinating contrasts. MacRitchie Reservoir: A Memory by Lee Tzu Pheng The families picnicking beside it seem unaware of its other side, enjoying the calm of tranquil water. Small children are always running to catch the bright bait of sinuous carp, pursued by their anxious elders so close to the edge; but nothing disturbs the couples rapt in their intent worlds, who might have been anywhere at all. Last morning the bandstand over the water rang with a brassy polka that danced in the sunlight drifting ripples, though the crowd seemed to drowse: all that music for free. Yet it’s the other side that intrigues me, the far reaches. Once I was there, not quite out of childhood, lost in a strange world of earth, roots, leaves, heat, stinging with insects, trapped in a mystery of trees, cut off from the far-off, familiar, safe home I had known. I expected, at any time, watery creatures to hump their way into the undergrowth, lured by the noise and stench of intruders. The most frightful of prospects was on-coming dark, with neither path nor break in the trees. The catchment, indeed, catches more than rain: I know that on the other side of this placid water, this orderly park, that other world waits, like all our other worlds, behind mists that sometimes lift quietly and unexpectedly, in the most peaceful of places.