Sudden Dreams - Softcover

10,000 Buddhas
Almost Perfect
At Shinbashi: New Bridge
The Atomic Soldier
Beginning World
Blood Sport
Bond
Continued
Country Western Bar
Dancers
A Day
The Dowser
The Dresser
Earl & Madge Take A Trip
The Emperor's 79th Birthday
Equinox Zydeco
Eye Blade
The Fall
Farmer Song
Fiddletown
Horse On A Fence
In Asia
Inflation
Isaac
Japan
Leaf Speaks
A Letter With Franz Kline
Light
Lightning
The Loss
Marriage
The Missing Sunflower
The Modern World
Molester
Nara
Neo Realist
New Hamlet
Northern Island
Note
Nuclear Sonnet
Ode To Fishers
Pachinko King
The Pendant
The Poet
Poppies Twisted To Peaks By Evening Light
Punitive Damages
A Renaissance Drunk
Revelation In The Mother Lode
Ryokan As An Old Man
San Francisco Sunset 1990
Saturday Towards Evening: 1
Saturday Towards Evening: 2
Saturday Towards Evening: 3
Saturday Towards Evening: 4
The Scene
Snake Year
Stream
Study Of My Father
A Summer
A Tenant Helps
The Times
To Who Said He Was Once A Painter
Travel Charm
Uji
Untitled
The Weather In Amador
What I Meant Was This
What It Is
What The Neighbor Said
Working For The Iceman
Wrecking
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Evan's landscape is American, from 11 car parts and appliances in weeds" in Fiddletown, California to his working father handing his son a shovel in Pittsburgh, where Evans spent his childhood. So these poems have arrived and what they have brought is a poetry that is unadorned, exquisitely controlled, and full of the matters of life. The poems are often about the common wages of everyday living and at other times they are ruminative observations of a walking poet. "Lightning" is a comic example of Evan's pull-at-out-sleeves, hey-check-this-out scene from the gritty everyday. Here we have an electrocuted Jack "waked at Turbo's Bar," where children are curious to know if the dead really do have pennies behind their closed eyelids. As the narrative marches along, we discover that in his young life Jack had once stolen a flatcar of copper. This copper has come back, with a haunting flash: "Jack stretched out like a wire//with his eyes burned out," - a sort of blown fuse and darkened house. As for the meditative poems, the most ambitious is "Eyeblade," a fourteen-page poem about observation. The poet recognizes that "objects slipped in and out of the sacred, [and] TV replaced distance and mind." The poem, then, is about the concrete and the abstract, or "the flying any" and those moments when we must say things like, "It's a bridge, all road and no sidewalk./ Don't fall asleep." This sectioned poem places a perplexing demand on the reader: the language of the poet moves from the straightforward to the abstract. However, we are better off for its demands, especially when we find ourselves agreeing to such lines as "A blind man, stick tapping, stops ... feeling the world/through his stick, the whole black sphere/attached to its tip." -- From Independent Publisher

After publishing three collections in England, Evans, whose poems bristle with energy, is now available on this side of the Atlantic. The poet, editor, and director of Streetfare Journal , a project that places poetry on buses across this country, writes vigorous, attentive poems. His subject matter is often the urban landscape--factories, clubs, oil-sprayed pigeons--but he also writes evocatively of rural scenes. In "Pachinko King," a section of poems written about traveling in Japan, Evans describes that country from his own wry perspective--not the typical tourist's--in such works as "Nara," "The Emperor's 79th Birthday," and "The Missing Sunflower." The latter joins two powerful images: Van Gogh's painting by that name and the bombing of Nagasaki into one emotive scene, "the plains as on canvas . . . curling and shivering with fire." Though several weaker poems could have been left out, this collection on the whole more than satisfies. Evans is certainly a poet to watch. Recommended.
- Doris Lynch, Oakland P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.