A Penance

Evans’s debut connects his own sense of the visible world, with all its plants and animals, its “cruel devices,” to metaphors and examples drawn from an underworld of prisons and mean streets. The figure in “Geode” “sleeps outside, a knife under her cheek,/ someone’s handprints on her bra”; “Black Today” follows a ghost in a prison yard, where “Everybody loves somebody elsewhere.” As the real lives of prisoners, and of potential victims, turn up in some of the poems, so do figures for wider injustice, for psychic confinement: “the stocked// basements we’ve dug/ to hide ourselves from// ourselves,” figures that link the cold war to the war on terror. And yet, for all the harsh reportage, Evans is at heart a Romantic who registers complaints less journalistic than yearningly metaphysical: “O, the world has grown so old./ The sparks are all flown... What happened to nickels under streetlamps?” Such questions cannot be answered; nor can the best of his poems. Evans confines himself largely to common words, but his depth of emotion is real, and rare. If the collection feels thin at times, too close almost to a thesis or a demonstration of Evans’s future promise, it certainly augurs well. (Oct.)