A Full-On Basso Profundo

Ken Evans’s collection is structured in three inter-locking and overlapping sequences: Family; Masculinity; and America. Subjects range from the personal sacrifice and meaning of an organ donation; the loss of a child in still-birth; the death of a friend through drink, as well as bigger themes of our constant wars and forebodings of climate collapse. But these poems also experience hope, humour and optimism shining through – and often co-existing with the darker themes, thus poems on the small vagaries and mishaps of our digital lives, of the money-anxieties of car maintenance, or of negotiating airport security with a replacement hip.

‘Evans has always been the keenest observer of the private self, the historical person, and all the versions in between. He writes the family with an unrivalled, gimlet-eyed affection; a wicked sense of humour and a deeper sense of compassion. In his new collection time seems to pass in two directions, through vivid memory and an inexplicable future, quantumly entangled. What we have, what we have always had, is each other, and all the complications that entails. His speakers have an encyclopaedic curiosity and wit, but the more we understand the more a definitive interpretation seems to recede like a false horizon. We’re supremely lucky to have a poet like him.’ —Luke Kennard

‘In a century where ‘memes float around like so much space debris’, Ken Evans’s latest collection quests for a different kind of intimacy, to go back to ‘what we know, at the sub-atomic level’. Whether unfolding childhood memories or scouring the corners of Travelodge rooms and pharmacy shelves, the energetic phrasing here enlivens every observation as we orbit ‘a sun raised by possibilities’.’ —John McCullough

‘Ken Evans’ new collection contains poems in a ten year-olds’ voice about becoming a ‘man’, for all that means to a little boy, ‘I’m ten, a pea on my fork, in after her to morning blood in our toilet’, to the grown persona of a man in a world of expensive ‘lederhosen’, an elegy for the lonely death above a pub of a friend, and about the desire to protect family and loved ones’.

Evans wonders ‘how the baffling distance men need in love, enters a boy.’ This book sings about vulnerability, illness, shame, grief, the broken down. This new collection boldly goes where few poems have gone before, from pineapple rings to Dostoyevsky, Butch Cassidy to Ella Fitzgerald.’ —Jessica Mookherjee

‘This is a wonderful poetry restless in its intrigue, subjects, form and above all, along with the wit and baroque style, there are quiet moments of compassion which take the breath away. A varied and exciting collection from a genuinely exciting voice on the scene.’ —Daljit Nagra