13th July
1830
'Formally inventive, rich in aslant borrowings, unafraid of visual and textual experiment, it is an exhilarating debut.' The Guardian
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry
Performing from his debut collection with an assembly of field recordings, voices, cassette tapes and original music, Rowan Evans will take us from the flooded and wooded terrains of Somerset and East Anglia to the burnt hills of Andalusía, in a sustained encounter with other languages, other texts and other species.
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, as ‘words / tear their wing bones / and grow new heads / in the wound.’
Bio:
Rowan Evans is a poet, composer and sound artist whose debut collection is A Method, A Path (Bloomsbury Poetry, 2023). He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2015 and his chapbook The Last Verses of Beccán (Guillemot Press, 2019) won the Michael Marks Award for Poetry. In 2022 he completed a practice-based PhD in modern poetry and early medieval languages at Royal Holloway University of London.