Kristian Evans authors the popular Kenfig Journal for the charity Sustainable Wales and currently lives among the dunes at Kenfig on the south Wales coast.
He’s a close observer of the expressions of the natural world and its dialogue with poetic tradition. But he’s ready and willing to test our conventions and expectations. Prose or poetry? In this, his first collection, the borderlines are blurred and burnished.
Blackbird
I read the blackbird, leading the boy
where the lane turns down below sea level—
the notes are unpeeling the sky’s pixels:
something like fear, something like simple noise.
Who else could decipher the signal?
The empty birch leaning over,
the brown rat burrowing among brambles?
Is this where we hit that fox last year?
But scrub those phantoms away
and listen to the solitary now.
There is no bird in any tree,
only the tree you are trying to say,
wandering out, again, for a beer or three
and troubling the why of it, and the how.
