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Wind makes lament
Heart will
not mend
The empty
hill
So wrote Paul Evans (1945-1991) at the close of an elegy for Idris
Davies, one of the longer poems included in the posthumous Selected, The
Door of Taldir,
edited by Robert Sheppard and published by Shearsman Books in 2009. It's a
good selection from Evans' work, and Sheppard is correct to note that
although he regarded himself as 'a traditional English lyric poet' he was
also a poet of 'deep Welsh inheritance' and in my opinion he was the
most poignant of the innovative poets of the British Poetry
Renaissance, a word I always preferred to 'Revival'. As Evans had said of the
word 'revival': 'I've always been amused by the religio-medical implications
of that term.'
I first met him in London in the 1970's. We shared a love of the poetry of
Lorine Niedecker, something few of our contemporaries did. In the first issue
of my poetry journal, Branch Redd Review, I published his 'Manual For The Perfect Organization Of
Tourneys', which became the title poem of the book published by Ian Robinson,
and which Tony Frazer of Shearsman, regards as Evans's best. Myself I could
not choose, but it is true that it is both a precise poem in terms
of its exactitude and a tour de force at the same time:
Sir Heart
sets out all innocent
with Ardent
Desire
but even he
(especially
he)
must drink
from the spring
the wrong
water:
thus, the
storyÉ
Ian Robinson accurately and acutely remarked of Evans: 'Unlike a lot of
poets, he didn't seem very concerned to push himself forward, and this, maybe
has something to do with why his poetry is not better known.' He was, of
course, included in the two major anthologies of British poetry
published in the 1980's: Matieres d'Angleterre (l984), edited by Pierre Joris
and Paul Buck; and The New British Poetry (1988), in the section edited by Eric
Mottram. As Lee Harwood wrote: 'The total and brutal fact of death is there.
And my own personal sense of loss, that emptiness, is beyond words,
almost, as it is for all who were close to him, all his family and friends.'
Evans was, Lee continues, 'A gent who combined an immense tenderness with wildness
and passion that blended uniquely in his nature.' From the top floor of his
flat in Hove, one could see a sliver of sea almost as if the view he had then
anticipated the tonal shift in his work. As Ella Fitzgerald breathed it: 'How
strange the change / From major to minor.' His
poems became more and more imbued with a heartsore sense of longing
and loss, always a leitmotif in his earlier poems, but always held in
check and deepened not simply by a distancing sense of self-deprecation
and ironic bemusement but also, as Eric Mottram commented: 'Mawkish emotion
and exhibitionist intellectuality never enter his work, and his wide tastes
in the arts excluded any conceivable nonsense of narrow poetics or
materials.'
"Where does
everybody go
after they
die?"
is a
clear-eyed question
in the voice
of a child
six years old
in
high-heeled shoes
and a teenage
dress.
Bop on, sweet
Lucy.
Never die.
Evans was an unabashed Romantic, albeit a stern one, and his enthusiasm, for
example, for a film we saw together, Aces High (not about poker, but about the young
men of the RAF in wartime) held him fascinated by the doomed grace of
those pilots in flight.
This is a small Selected rather than an attempt at a Collected, and it serves
as an excellent entrance to his work, not just for a UK readership of
21st century poets who are unfamiliar with his unique exploratory and
finely honed and crafted poetry, but for an American readership seemingly finally
so concerned to catch-up with and investigate and hopefully learn
from what was going down in the UK especially during those years when
first Bunting and then MacDiarmid served as President of The Poetry Society.
But perhaps Evans' daughter Lucy should have the last word. Her poem was
published in The Empty Hill (memories and praises of Paul Evans, Skylark Press, 1992):
Bright yellow
jacket, mud green wellies,
smart navy
trousers, blue wax jacket,
serene at
times.
Bright yellow
beard, white tennis shorts
tearing
across courts, jazz mad,
thunder at
times.
Little red
car, Mickey Mouse tie,
dark green
suit, old pair of trunks.
Once compared
to Mick Jagger,
but my dad
all the time.
©
Bill Sherman 2009
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