Cenotaph

"There is no end to this desert / or the playfulness of blackbirds" reads the opening two lines of Evans' extraordinary new collection, a fitting start for a book of poems that simultaneously mourns a past that can never be recovered and also finds regeneration and renewal in the act of creation. This image reveals one the book's central conceits: a quest for meaning in a dead and dying world, a journey at once playful and profound. For Evans, the act of writing is its own cenotaph, a marke...