Suzannah V. Evans

Ocean

Under the Blue

Under the Blue is an arresting, deeply candid exploration of both the shimmering beauty of life and the realities of care.

Through a series of fragmental prose poems and evocative postcards, Suzannah V. Evans has produced a kaleidoscopic meditation grounded by profound humanity and empathy – about intimacy and togetherness, sickness and pain, what can be said and what remains unsayable.

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Brightwork

Playfully concerned with things, and words as things, the poems of  Brightwork lend an ear to the surrounding soundscape of creaking pontoons, whistling patent slips, and harbourside voices.  Brightwork was written during a residency at Underfall Yard, a working boatyard in Bristol, and is intended as a close reading of place, and of the objects in that place, turning its attention to slipways and skips, sluice paddles and slotting machines, boats and buoys.


‘In their variety and precision, Suzannah V. Evans’ brilliant poems reflect both the polish and refinement of the vessels’ metallic “brightwork”, but also her encounter with the Modernism of objects and truthful-seeing.’ – Will Eaves‘We were bowled over by the play and sheer musicality . . . Hers is a unique and resonant poetry, a series of ‘brilliant apparatus[es]’, which are seemingly never content to rest or compromise in their search to uncover the correct or fitting way of naming, and thus bringing into being, this nautical and dreamlike terrain.’ – Richard Scott‘The voice which rises from these poems, in all their pain and playfulness, is animated with love for things in the world and for words as things. The deft match of content and form strengthens the range of tone from meditative to joyous to challenging.’ – Anthony Vahni Capildeo‘In Brightwork, her voice continues to develop with singular and exhilarating focus.’ – Oliver Southall, Tears in the Fence‘It is a restless book of short pieces of poetry and prose ebbing and flowing with a constant movement as words find their settled place for a moment on the page.’ – Ian Brinton, Long Poem Magazine

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Marine Objects / Some Language

Marine Objects is a sequence of poems based on the artist Eileen Agar’s sculpture Marine Object (1939). Ekphrastic, fractal, these poems unfold via repetition and the gradual development of language, lines, sound, and themes. Some Language takes the sea as its starting point, with poems set by shorelines, inside creaking boats, and balanced above rockpools, looking closely at the life found in these places.


‘Like the “brittle blushing objects, all briny” that they describe, Suzannah V. Evans’ poems are to be handled delicately and marveled at.’ – Isabel Galleymore‘These are poems to hold onto with both hands, as the pamphlets of Marine Objects / Some Language tenderly hold each other. Prising the two apart “as if they are the twin halves of a soft razor shell” is to watch – hold your breath! – an intricate balancing act of language and image, poet and lobster pot.’ – Holly Corfield Carr‘The reader is invited to engage with the poems tidally: to scan backwards and forwards between accretions and deposits.’ – Jake Morris-Campbell, The Poetry School‘I’m no wave expert, but I know roughly that waves are the transfer of energy, and pressure, and tumbling layers of water, and that doesn’t diminish the dizziness I feel watching them. Reading Suzannah V. Evans’ poems I feel similarly hypnotised, reeling forwards and backwards, carried by their individual and collective energy, by language both frothing and silky.’ – Miranda Cichy, SPAM

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All Keyboards are Legitimate:
Versions of Jules Laforgue

All Keyboards are Legitimate is an anthology featuring an incredible cast of contemporary poets responding to the work of nineteenth-century French poet Jules Laforgue (1860-87).Laforgue, born in Montevideo, Uruguay, moved to Tarbes in the Pyrenees at the age of six, later living in Paris and Berlin, where he was reader to the German Empress Augusta. He learned English by reading Shakespeare with the governess Leah Lee, who he married in December 1886 in St Barnabas Church, London – the same church where T. S. Eliot would marry Valerie Fletcher. Known as one of the innovators of vers libre, Laforgue published alongside Rimbaud, translated Walt Whitman, and published several key poetry collections: Les Complaintes (1885), L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886), and the posthumous free verse collection Derniers vers (1890). He died of tuberculosis in 1887.


‘The book’s frequent grouping of multiple versions of the same poem attests to the sheer range of things to be learnt, the number of latent possibilities present in any one poem.’ – Will Burns, The London Magazine

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New Poetries VIII

A Poetry Book Society Spring 2021 Special Commendation. Edited by Michael Schmidt and John McAuliffe, this is the latest in Carcanet's celebrated introductory anthology series presenting work by two dozen poets writing in English from around the world.

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Rondel

A tender thing, to wash my mother’s hand.
I hand it to her other hand to hold
then turn the tap to warm, as it was cold.
I hold my hands beneath it, fingers fanned.I cup my hands to form a dish to hold
the water that I carry in my hand.
My mother’s in her chair, her sleeves are rolled.I break my clasp to let the water land
on my mother’s hand, her fingers cold.
I take the soap then lather up my hand
and lace our hands together in a hold.
A tender thing, to wash my mother’s hand.

Suzannah V. Evans is a poet, researcher, and educator. Her debut poetry collection is Under the Blue, forthcoming from Bloomsbury Poetry in September 2025. She is the author of  Brightwork and Marine Objects / Some Language, and the editor of All Keyboards are Legitimate: Versions of Jules Laforgue (Guillemot Press). A chapter of her work appears in Carcanet’s anthology New Poetries VIII. Her poetry has been awarded the Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment and a Northern Writers’ Award, performed at international festivals, and broadcast on BBC Radio. Her poems feature in  New Statesman, The London Magazine, PN Review, and English: Journal of the English Association. She holds an AHRC-funded PhD in modern poetry from Durham University, with recent research in The Review of English Studies, and her first academic monograph is forthcoming. Entitled Listening to Laforgue and Corbière in T. S. Eliot, this book considers Eliot’s astonishing engagement with nineteenth-century French poetry. Suzannah lives in Bristol, where she teaches literature and creative writing.

Portrait of Suzannah V. Evans

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