Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

  John Evans was born in Gorseinon, Wales, in 
  1923 and educated at Gowerton County
  Intermediate School, Swansea University and
  The Open University, where he graduated in
  physics and mathematics. For a short time he
  served as a lieutenant in The Royal Corps of
  Signals in Germany. After his national service
  he became a lecturer in physics and mathematics at College of Technology in Leicester and Swansea. He contributed to the commemorative volume Something Attempted Something Done which marked the demise of grammar school status for Gowerton School, and was co-author with D. Glyndwr Richards and Geo. Mainwaring of A Hundred Years of Harmony, celebrating the centenary of Dunvant Male Choir.

   He has contributed widely to poetry magazines in Wales and England and has written four volumes of poetry, The Stone Corn, The Survivor, Late Lamps and Paper Songs, all published by Swansea Poetry Workshop. He retired from college and still finds time to write and publish poetry. In 2002, he was made a member of the Gorsedd Circle at the St David's Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales.

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"Cold craftsmanship is the best container of fire" declared Vernon Watkins, the Swansea / Gower poet, and the published work of J.C. Evans is a fine endorsement of the statement. His latest collection, Paper Songs, displays an array of mature writing skills, an engaging and organised intelligence, and an individual poetic voice. It is a voice that is assured and loaded with integrity. The poems are vibrant with a subtle use of language and, to quote Watkins's friend Dylan Thomas, they pulse with "the colour of saying". It is, though, the regular muscular competence found in R.S. Thomas's poetry and the sensitivity witnessed in Alun Lewis's work that have made J. C. Evans a "poet's poet". He is one of those widely-published poets who never disappoints; and to see his work in a magazine or an anthology is always a joy.

   A Welsh-speaking Welshman, he has achieved his poetic authority via an admirable commitment to his art. His knowledge of music, art and science is often a platform for his poetry. Indeed, to paraphrase the American poet James Dickey, an acknowledged admirer of Wales's Alun Lewis, J.C. Evans has a most impressive "memory bank" to call upon.

   Paper Songs adds palpably to his reputation. The range of the poems is inspirational. In the informal poem Birds the stanzas are tightly packed like nests, each word placed for maximum effect. This is stanza two:

Seagull
whining scavenger
telling of lost seas
and old ships
your cries
stick in my gullet
like gutted fish
thrown from
the high-walled town.

The four ballad quatrains of Chorale reveal a writer able to fully control strict forms too. Its opening is as compact as a haiku:

Once we sang
notes high and low
startling as flowers
over white snow.

He has, in fact, the gift of being able to shape a poem's opening so that it arrests instantly. He also uses words like a painter uses colours, creating visual delights for the reader. Down the Lane is a water-colour of words. For example:

...where a narrow sky tilts rain
towards sunset.
                  Flighting birds,
mincing hieroglyphs among
the hedges...

He can capture hard, city portraits too:

A traffic cop sits astride
a solo motorcycle,
white, bulbous
with electronic toys,
flash and German
its tank pregnant
with arrogance and harm;
the vibratory whistle
slams its kilohertz
pissing into my ears. 
                                                                from Saturday Morning

   Even when the language of the poems is complex, when "Words are doors themselves" as Heaney said, the writer's work still offers an accessible entrance. The difficulty is never a mere verbal barricade, but an attempt to explore the echoing shafts of an experience. This can lead him into known cul-de-sacs of truths:

Drained in the smooth
night, almost sleeping,
he hears only the tick
of a shabby clock, rises
to see himself at
whatever age is old,
dancing singing moving
like an angular tune
from a barrel organ.
The melody catches fire in the night,
and the garden in autumn rain
is etched with blunt shade. 
                                                                             from Grown Old

This is a book of hope, indeed "a book of paper songs", an awareness that all we hold dear is fragile but valuable:

Through strains of my season's fading
my turbulent heart sings in delight. 
                                                                                     from Carys

I leave the final words to another admirer of J.C. Evans. Malcolm Parr, a Swansea writer and critic, wrote in an article on J.C. (commissioned by me when I edited Swagmag for four years): `But I always think of J.C. himself as the survivor in the sense that he has battled his way to a position of dignity and respect among his fellow poets. His vocabulary, his use of analogy and metaphor, his metrical versatility, his wide variety of themes mark him out as an outstanding master of his craft, a word he loves'.