Cenotaph - Evans, Justin

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Résumé :
There is no end to this desert / or the playfulness of blackbirds reads the opening two lines of Evans' extraordinary new collection, a fitting start for a book of poems that simultaneously mourns a past that can never be recovered and also finds regeneration and renewal in the act of creation. This image reveals one the book's central conceits: a quest for meaning in a dead and dying world, a journey at once playful and profound. For Evans, the act of writing is its own cenotaph, a marker that reminds us of what's lost while inspiring us with its careful artistic craftsmanship.

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Sommaire:
Jeff Newberry, author of How to Talk About the Dead and Cross Country

Two worlds inhabit Justin Evans' Cenotaph, 'one of flesh and one of bone.' When I think of an empty tomb I think of darkness, yet Cenotaph is full of light. In this elegiac, evocative collection the Great Basin Desert is where the light dazzles-in the mornings where Evans finds hope in the resolve of each new day, and at dusk with its call for prayer. Evans sits with his dead in a landscape full of life, 'There is breath here, and breeze / that carries our song across the land.' He resists the heaviness of the past, and reveals in vivid, lyrical language 'not everything / is lost' that the dead and the living remain friends. Justin Evans' Cenotaph is a powerful psalm for those of us present and for those who have passed on.

-Suzanne Frischkorn, author of Fixed Star
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