Rowan Evans – författare

Grappling with nature, religion, violence and politics, poems of lucid intensity and astonishing power from three remarkable British poetsGeoffrey Hill (1932-2016) was often considered the greatest English-language poet of his generation.Penguin Modern Poets 7: God Is Distant gathers a selection spanning Hill's full body of poetry, from the astonishing power and compression of the first five decades to the greater experimentalism and fluency of the creative outpouring that began in 1997, and places it alongside work by two younger British poets: Rowan Evans, whose 'tirelessly inventive' and 'vivid lyrical work' (Denise Riley, Eric Gregory Award citation) plays with the legacy of late modernism to create poetry of great beauty, energy and precision; and Toby Martinez de las Rivas, whose first two collections have seen his 'visionary disposition' (Guardian) build to rhetorical heights of Blakean dimensions.Taken together, these are poems of lucid intensity, high seriousness and knowing sidelong glances, as alert to the natural world of the British countryside as they are to the body that suffers and to questions of the soul. They take a long view of humanity's riches and crises, and consider along the way such issues as morality, faith, innocence, redemption, the public spaces of democracy and the acts of violence that rupture them, as well as that patron animal of the Modern Poets series: the urban fox.

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION 2023**An award-winning poet explodes the notion of translation, showing us the poem in a supple, malleable form'Formally inventive, rich in aslant borrowings, unafraid of visual and textual experiment, it is an exhilarating debut' Guardian________________________________The poems at the centre of A Method, A Path explore the turbulent transmission of historical and mythic voices that ‘reach across’ time and place, and a fierce rejection of the nationalist ideologies that have sought to ‘island’ them. Here, translation is a lived and open-ended negotiation, invested in the potential for magic utterance and ritual action in spite of language’s violence: ‘words / tear their wing bones / and grow new heads / in the wound (‘On Eglond’). Each poem or sequence gathers around a different instance of dialogue or communication with others: with other voices and languages, with other authors and found texts, with other species. They also mark a record of Evans’ interdisciplinary collaboration with other artists and performers through his work both as writer and sound artist. The physical and textual landscapes of the book move from the flooded and wooded terrains of Somerset and East Anglia, to the burnt hills of Andalusía in the company of Federíco García Lorca, the poems always inhabiting a place between Evans' own words and external voices – whether via translation, haunting, or invocation. In this ‘tirelessly inventive, substantial collection of vivid lyrical work’ (Denise Riley, Eric Gregory Awards), the truant strangeness of the more-than-human world is made present in its ability to warp and transform the poet’s voice, where ‘even the ground under your feet is a fluid, malleable surface’ (Kayo Chingonyi).

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION 2023**An award-winning poet explodes the notion of translation, showing us the poem in a supple, malleable form''Formally inventive, rich in aslant borrowings, unafraid of visual and textual experiment, it is an exhilarating debut'' Guardian________________________________The poems at the centre of A Method, A Path explore the turbulent transmission of historical and mythic voices that ''reach across'' time and place, and a fierce rejection of the nationalist ideologies that have sought to ''island'' them. Here, translation is a lived and open-ended negotiation, invested in the potential for magic utterance and ritual action in spite of language''s violence: ''words / tear their wing bones / and grow new heads / in the wound (''On Eglond''). Each poem or sequence gathers around a different instance of dialogue or communication with others: with other voices and languages, with other authors and found texts, with other species. They also mark a record of Evans'' interdisciplinary collaboration with other artists and performers through his work both as writer and sound artist. The physical and textual landscapes of the book move from the flooded and wooded terrains of Somerset and East Anglia, to the burnt hills of Andalusía in the company of Federíco García Lorca, the poems always inhabiting a place between Evans'' own words and external voices – whether via translation, haunting, or invocation. In this ''tirelessly inventive, substantial collection of vivid lyrical work'' (Denise Riley, Eric Gregory Awards), the truant strangeness of the more-than-human world is made present in its ability to warp and transform the poet''s voice, where ''even the ground under your feet is a fluid, malleable surface'' (Kayo Chingonyi).