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As well as having his poetry published in mumerous magazines and
anthologies, John has had two collections of poetry published,
Less (1990), and Out (1992).
Less Published by Underground Press (1990) ISBN: B0000EF2ID Price: £2.50
Out Published by Underground Press (1992) ISBN: Price: £2.50
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| Review of Less
Less Means More Where ever there’s a reading there’s a press. With the epicentre of poetry activity moving up the valley from Cardiff to Pontypridd where Noumena is packing them in on Tuesday nights it was inevitable that someone would start publishing things. John Evans’ Less (£2.50 from the newly established Underground Press) is aptly named, This is minimalist, language school of writing in the style of Oppen, Raworth and Bernstein but with a strong Welsh bent. Maerdy, St. David’s, Rhondda, Ystrad-ffin - defined locations all reduced to ‘groups of country‘ - ‘to stop, go out of it.’ If you are looking for metrical fireworks, pithy wit or engaging anecdote stay away. John Evans is very much a post-modernist applying the type of linguistic technique usually reserved for use by Americans. It’s controversial territory of the kind that will start some readers muttering about how Pound never really meant this when he advocated revolution. But if you want to be up front then this is the cutting edge. Peter Finch - What’s Happening, April 1990
Review of Out For 22 years I’ve waited for the emergence of this man. Excepting my good buddy Peter Finch, there’s been no-one else on the scene willing to go right over the edge, take the drop, and bring us back the evidence the way this man does. When I came to Wales to live & write in 1970, I just assumed that breakthroughs in writing such as the New Journalism, Open Field or Beat poetry, the body of expression that is now referred to as Post-Modernism (Olson, Creeley, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs etc) would by a process of osmosis be accepted and utilised in a new dynamic of creative writing. Not on your nelly! That prophetic steam has been blocked off, systematically derided, suffocated: rejected by & large by the universities and academics, & stiffly resisted by the literary establishment, headed by the likes of Thwaite, Morrison & Motion (“Olson? Over my dead body!...”) & because the limp & regressive Ango-Welsh equivalent has looked
to the English, sorry the London scene, both as model & s source
of loot, there has been very little fresh air let into Wales in
the shape of genuinely innovative writers such as John Evans.
Any bold experiment has been allowed to wither on the vine, rather
than admit that the old forms & formalities are worn out, & that
the whole scope of poetry has to be stretched & exploded to encompass
the incredible psychic upheavals that are accelerating us towards
the end of this momentous century of change. John Evans is from Pontypridd. After an earlier career in the music biz including a stint with the YOUNG MARBLE GIANTS, he turned to poetry, freelance journalism, & helping organise the NOUMENA writing group. The peculiar shapes his writings make both on the page & in the mind-heart-soul complex may seem to be daunting & offputting at first; but persistence, hanging in there with these construct is ultimately a rewarding experience that takes the reader to areas not normally reached by other poets. John’s stuff is spikey, unusual. It makes more than consumerists
demands upon the reader - it makes the reader work. & because
the reader has to work for the product, to puzzle a way into the
acute conundrums of many of these poems, he/she enters into a
symbiotic partnership with the work & the resonances & structures
that build from it. Not more than half the book can be described as “difficult” though. Some of the poems are mantic chants, celtic spiral vibrations, pairings of yin-yang forces that touch both on the abstract & on a nervy sublimity. There are poems as plain, bare & bleak as the uplands of the chopped Valleys that are the salient backdrop to John’s life. Some doppler into needlestones of Wales’ Dark Ages past, such as ZERO LAUNCH, with capital letters packed in a slim volume which dissects the words creating occulted meanings beyond their apparent everyday sense. John Evans shows us material suggesting huge gaps, or so understated it can scarcely be said to exist. As though expressing the deculturisation which has murdered the life force of the Valleys. There’s no lushness, no romance here, but a critical & analytic mind carving what is felt. The absolute bottom line. His work reflects both his sense of the local & a demotic internationalism allowing an organisational freedom into the poetry that has scarcely been seen in Wales before. This collection should be ignored neither by traditionalists nor by anyone who believes that the people can take back the work, can recover it from those who devalue or debase it for commercial or political reasons. John Evans’s work represents an antennae of intense lyric consciousness, mining directly at the interface, where meaning constantly forms & reforms in synch with the tides of time & space, of decay & revolution. Don’t miss it. Chris Torrance, The Wobbly, 1992
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Copyright © [www.johnevans.org.uk]
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