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Search - Sudden Dreams

Sudden Dreams
Author: George Evans

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... more », 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."

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."

ISBN-13: 9780918273864
ISBN-10: 0918273862
Publication Date: 7/1991
Pages: 106
Edition: First Edition
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Coffee House Press
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

Literature & Fiction >> Poetry
Literature & Fiction >> Poetry >> Single Authors

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