Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781854115461
Publication date: June 13, 2011
Price: £8.99
Out of stock
The Ivy Hides the Fig-ripe Duchess is an exhilarating first collection of poems from Ellie Evans. Using a surrealist palette of imagery and a tightly focused idiom, the author takes us on strange journeys:to the post-apocalyptic world of the title poem, or into a skewed 18th century Venice in ‘The Zograscope’. These strange worlds are always to the purpose, they are, as Marianne Moore famously said of poetry ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them.’ We obliquely unearth childhood trauma, fraught or intense relationships and also a singular (and perhaps also Welsh?) delight in rebellion, and in escape through the imagination. Poems like ‘Picnic with Earthquakes’ and ‘Jekyl Island, Georgia’ deftly align exotic locales (Eastern Europe, South East Asia, Greece and the USA,) with intimate states of mind. A fascination with art and history emerge in: ‘A Brief History of Topiary’ and ‘Two Monologues from The Odyssey’. There is also a palpable delight in technique: you will find a sonnet, a villanelle, triolets and a concise free verse where she employs rhyme, half-rhyme, and subtle alliteration.
“Ellie Evans’s poetry sings without pretension” – Leah Fritz, Poetry Review
Listen to Ellie Evans read her title poem, ‘The Ivy Hides the Fig-Ripe Duchess’:
Ellie Evans
Ellie Evans (1942-2012) was born in Carmarthen and was educated in Llandeilo and Cardiff. After reading English at Oxford, she worked in publishing and for the Medical Research Council, before living in Hong Kong, teaching English. She spent most of her adult life teaching in London, but later based herself in Powys. She began writing poetry in 2005. Evans’ poems have been published in several anthologies and in magazines including PNR, Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, Red Poets, The Rialto and Acumen. Evans gave readings at the Bath Literature Festival, Bath Poetry Cafe, Dartington’s ‘Ways with Words’ and ‘The Muses’ Workshop’ on the island of Spetses, Greece. She sadly passed away in September 2012.
