A Method, A Path

by Rowan Evans

**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 '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 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).

Genres: Poetry

74 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 8, 2023

Reviews

[rik ✎ᝰ. · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Do you ever open a a page in a book and start seeing (th)e white spaces more than the words?... Have you ever tried reading a page of a book in a language you don't understand?'

———

Evans' poetry is unlike anything I have had the pleasure of reading before, although quite frankly I feel too poorly learned to adequately review it. This is a book that will change your understanding of what poetry can be and leave you feeling a little lost: like you've caught a glimpse of something incredibly profound out of the corner of your eye that changes each time you try to get a good look.

Nonetheless, this love letter to language and history will remain in your thoughts for a while, prompting you to look at the artistry of life a little differently. You can choose to let it wash over and soak into you, content, or you can choose to analyse, unpick, decipher it until you feel the same passion (or mild frustration depending on your temperament) that's woven through the page. Each experience will be differently rewarding.

Thank you to Bloomsbury Publishing for the chance to read and review this collection.


🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑 3.5 / 5

[Tony · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have given this one star based on this first reading. This is almost certainly harsh, but whilst I struggle to find clarity of meaning in some poetry. I feel you have to come to this armed with prior knowledge, which isn't a disqualification. Poets do that all the time. But I feel like Evans is trying too hard here.

There's a quote on on the cover flaps from judges' comments at the Michael Marks Awards that states: "...language is wrenched and stretched at every turn...Unnerving, disturbing and otherworldly, this is poetry of daring and, in spite of itself sonic beauty." The italics are mine. In spite of itself. Surely that is an implication that any sonic beauty in these poems is accidental, not deliberate. Indeed that whole quote reads like a group of people admitting they didn't really understand what was going on but it seemed impressive and it sounded cool.

I can see some of what Evans is trying to do. I think. His dipping backwards into Anglo-Saxon, his interaction with other literature and other languages is interesting. One of the poems is in dialogue with Shakespeare's Sonnet 73. There's nothing wrong with that. Luke Kennard won a poetry prize with a whole book of 'Notes on the Sonnets'. But...

I found most of the collection slippery and hard to grasp. Perhaps I am a bear of little brain. Perhaps all my reading of poetry has taught me nothing. And this isn't a complaint about poetry being 'difficult'. I don't want or need to be spoon fed. But equally I don't want to feel about a poetry collection the way I feel about Damien Hirsts art. That I'm being told something is brilliant that I can't understand.

As I always say though this is my personal reaction. Perhaps I'm wrong. After all I'm not a judge of literary prizes, a professional poet or an academic. Perhaps I can only swim in the shallow end of poetry.

This is nominated for the Forward Poetry Prize. I plan to read all of them before the announcement is made. So, I'm going to come back to this collection. There is an audiobook version so I'm going to hammer at this with that and the text and see if I can crack it. Perhaps I won't. Perhaps it'll never be my cup of tea.

Also read it yourself. I could just be a fool.

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Hold the quicknames carefully. Words were a recording device, each bird-sound cut into language’s surface, now becoming, now waxing. Say what say how, gesture that rare decibel. Go enter a wood that won't resolve to easy clearing. Assembly of stone. Or maybe a series of side fissures crept through, shod.” Rowan Evans’ A Method, A Path is a fearless attempt in poetry to communicate across time, language, species and worlds in search of greater music. The first word of the very first poem, ‘On Ēglond’, is the imperative “Listen”, echoing the Old English poetry that is so frequently engaged with and translated and contorted; this first instruction sets the tone for the rest of the lyrical dreamlike collection. “Reading the elegy that winter is, / moonlight caught in a runnel at the close / edge of the field, in every other rut / on the flooded clay. / A quality of apprehension / itself, not of the object lit upon; / light | ictus | falling on the backs of stones.” I especially liked ‘Plainsong’, ‘Goldfinch’, and ‘Tide Ritual’, a good poem to read now, insisting that “the year is ending”. And there’s the title poem, four peculiar fragments, the fourth beginning: “and re-enter the poem, so i might startle it into showing itself. writing is disruption owing to its present. and must.” As Evans pushes language and meaning to its limit, much as in the works of Beckett, the light that emanates from its fissures is revelatory. He sees “a habit of body drawn / in outer stretch of light”; elsewhere he notes how “beauty overbore me // so much movement in it.” Much like the sea which recurs in this collection, there is vast beauty and unfathomable dark coexisting here.

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

from 'On Ēglond'

The poem I hold in my hand is a single island,
a stone dropped in a river eleven centuries ago.
[...]
It is also amorphous, a stringy mass of texts, pretexts,
limbs, voices, heads, manuscripts, contested grounds, false lineages.
[...]
What is my relation to the stone and to the creature? (7)

**

from 'Envoys'

What I wouldn't call communion
of the senses, ochre clefts truant
from the spreeing words, and too much Latin
snared in the bog where thorns bud yellow.
Gorse pushing between pools on the moor
states only in aspect, abject glimmer,
something unfelt but said. (28)
[...]
Sunlight is alien technology
geared to loosening agency over
the stone beaches of Ines Mór.
Metal in a low rain, more of the ground
and clad to it than light is. Turned
to face the fixed descent, phasing with sleep,
I pledge myself onto external things. (29)
[...]
Darkness from when. The plane of this world
'is wholly contingent with a body',
and those are words remote from night-flare.

In a yellow light, certain tracks pass
the submerged reeds and blackish water of
the Hackney Marshes, where I've never been. (32).

[Olivia-Savannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I started this poetry collection I was feeling incredibly poetry deprived and reading this resolved that!

I really liked the first half of the collection. The writing is beautiful, and slightly challenging to follow in a way that demands attention and is satisfying once you parse it out.

There's a lot of playing with language and nature imagery.

It however, lost me in the second half of the collection. There is not a noticeably massive shift in style, but suddenly I found the poems much harder to understand. They felt too disjointed and random for me...

I could tell that what I was reading was beautifully written, but it meant nothing to me because I couldn't understand it 🥲

[Corinna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this, Evans pushes the boundaries of language and voice to create a work that is fresh and magical.

[Leeza · Rating 4 out of 5]

enjoyed my time immersed in this strange, uncanny, disorienting language