Growth Rings

Christine Evans' characteristic themes and concerns—family, childhood memories, and the history and landscape of her area of north Wales, particularly Bardsey Island—reappear in this collection that features moving poems about the private aftermath of public cataclysms such as war, earthquakes, and nuclear testing. The domestic is often cleverly subverted and interwoven with both the spiritual and political, and short pieces offer brief, almost hallucinatory glimpses of their subjects. In addition, longer, discursive poems, such as the elegiac Swimmers—dedicated to two local fishermen, both lost within a month of each other—reveal a versatile use of form.