Poetry review – A FULL-ON BASSO PROFUNDO: Jean Atkin investigates a complex and strongly-felt collection by Ken Evans
A Full-On Basso Profundo
Ken Evans
Salt Publishing 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78463-335-6
£10.99
Ken Evans has divided this ambitious and searching collection into three overlapping sections. The Oikosphere – from oikos – family, household (Greek); The Anersphere – from aner – male (Greek); and Americanicity, a pleasing word I’d not heard before, noted as ‘an uncommon noun’.
The opening poem “And the Blithe Shall Eat a Horse” (after ‘Migration’ by Karen Solie) plunges the reader into the jarring, contradictory world we live in. It’s painfully familiar – ‘Outside, April’s drought goes unnoticed as crisis/ overshadows the actual crisis. Dictators loop-/ the-loop’. And it’s also darkly funny: ‘A Little Eaton man spots the Loch Ness Monster./ In a way, he’s not far wrong’.
In this first section “Oikosphere”, there are poems which focus on close family. The moving “Purple Iris” looks back on a lost baby, who would now be ‘twenty-four next birthday – what a time/ for you’. The poet imagines meeting downstairs at four in the morning: ‘we’d share the one light from a fridge-door// over milk and cereal, and I will try and pull you close,/ ask where you’ve been all these nights,/ scaring us…’
I was struck by the fierce detail in “Lucien Freud Drawing His Dead Mother”: ‘The face is all, the sanctuary// of ruin. Black nostrils, empty snail shells. Blood/ pools below her skin. He crosshatches…’ There’s a brilliant line in which we see Freud at work: ‘forcing himself to draw,// motionless on the hard metal fact of his chair’.
Within the same section, Evans shows us a different kind of family in existential crisis at sea. “The Custom of the Sea” inhabits the characters involved in desperate late 19th century cannibalism.
A cabin boy against three toughened sailors. He gives way to the bosun,
who has him tight, lets him cry on his chest, hollowed-out by two weeks
hunger. The bosun says, blessings, laddie.
They speak a psalm as ‘the blade sweeps the neck’, and the partaking men ‘grow a different shape, shadows twist behind their ribs…the slim wafer has burnt a hole in their tongues. / A rescuing captain, seeing their brandedness, says nothing.’
How we are marked by trauma is a theme this collection often explores. In “The Wolf’s Bite” (Lupus, an incurable chronic immune system illness), the moment of giving dreadful news is re-experienced –
it’s your sister’, as if down the line,
she shouldn’t hear me as they share
the news you only want to say once
to your mother.
Evans then evokes ‘the pack’
which ‘circles in the dark beyond the TV, voices in
the hall crevassed by silence, a swishing
of legs through a deep fall, a forest of ears,
tundra-hungry teeth.
I found this a vivid and truthful account of such moments in memory, in the dreadful strength of imprinted minutes, and their accompanying, and re-visited internalised fear.
But this collection is also full of variety. In “101 Ways to Get Out of Bed (Abridged)”, we are offered in fact three, each of which will raise a smile. For example –
1). The Fosbury Flop
Using the headboard and a torsion in your back and hips, you twist, rise
in one coiled move over the bar of the mattress, land on your knees,
waiting for the breath you once had, and on with your stick, for a piss.
In conclusion, Evans points out there are another 98 more ways to ‘reflect on how to free yourself/ from the rack’ but ‘tea arrives by blue angel, and a sun raised on possibilities’.
The second section “The Anersphere”, explores, very broadly, issues of gender and (sometimes toxic) masculinity. In “Song of the Wild”, which opens the section, Ukrainian soldiers at the front are offered a visit to a sperm bank: ‘A dandelion seed/ flying into sun/… one lucky one clings to an egg wall/ the prize almost nothing/ while being it all’…
Then in an ambitious and engrossing long poem “An Invisible Fury”, the poet takes the yet-to-be-discovered 100+km of cave systems under northern England, and imagines the future. First comes ‘THE ACTION:’ in which stone bridges are blown apart ‘by a recipe from Asda’; and though no-one dies, there is ‘super-sizing terror’. And ‘In the National Park, there’s been no cool summers/ since 1996. We don’t remember/ or cancel this’. Then comes ‘THE ACTOR: Rachel is rid of male Sieg Heils and their New Balance trainers, / her new home a cave and her mortgage, the climate.’ After this ‘Rachel’ in ‘her own changing, she/they, sees the oil barons grow/ eight pairs of buttocks and shit black shit/ copiously out from each, upon our earth’.
In the last section of this long poem ‘THERE’S NO POSTSCRIPT TO APOCALYPSE:’
Renewing the rage in 2032, she/they earns the title
of an ‘Invisible Fury’, as elusive
as swifts that no-one sees coming or know still exist.
And in this way ‘the young fight the old, winning lawsuits’ – but no ‘Reparation swag’ will ‘hold bloated rivers long’. The poem’s final stanza is worth quoting in full, as it contains the collection title, and all the poet’s rage, disbelief, and incredulity.
A panto cow at Youlgrave Hall, Carbon face and Methane arse,
moos, ‘Show us the science!’ They, now full-on basso profundo
bellow, ‘Behind you, it’s behind you! Close the spigot off, now!
The collection’s final section is “Americanicity”, in which the poems rip ferociously into the world of the super-rich and the madness which they normalise. “SpongeBob Lollipops All Over America” is about school shooters. And in “The Ts & Cs of Private Space Travel” the numbered points include:
3. You can sit strapped in your seat for up to 90
minutes, if there’s a launch delay, without access to
a lavatory; you are relaxed with 5 other people, with
the hatch closed…
We know the kind of venture he’s talking about. Meanwhile, and on the contrary, in “Ghosts of San Francisco” – ‘two guys shuffle by/ at the lights fidgety discuss the virtues/ of Whole Foods versus Walmart foil./ ‘Walmart rips, man, after one hit’.
Near the end of the collection is the beautiful poem “A Heat Mirage in the Navajo Desert”. Given all that’s going on in the US at the moment, this poem about the Nádleehi, born male but who function in the role of a woman – or born female but function as a man – strikes a sweet note against intolerance: ‘Nádleehi live their uncertainty/ happy uncaring/ of a single descriptor their gaze/ knowing change is/ always here.’
A Full-On Basso Profundo is a deeply-felt collection for right now. Ken Evans challenges, with craft and musicality, the state we’re in. A necessary book.
Apr 7 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Ken Evans
Poetry review – A FULL-ON BASSO PROFUNDO: Jean Atkin investigates a complex and strongly-felt collection by Ken Evans
Ken Evans has divided this ambitious and searching collection into three overlapping sections. The Oikosphere – from oikos – family, household (Greek); The Anersphere – from aner – male (Greek); and Americanicity, a pleasing word I’d not heard before, noted as ‘an uncommon noun’.
The opening poem “And the Blithe Shall Eat a Horse” (after ‘Migration’ by Karen Solie) plunges the reader into the jarring, contradictory world we live in. It’s painfully familiar – ‘Outside, April’s drought goes unnoticed as crisis/ overshadows the actual crisis. Dictators loop-/ the-loop’. And it’s also darkly funny: ‘A Little Eaton man spots the Loch Ness Monster./ In a way, he’s not far wrong’.
In this first section “Oikosphere”, there are poems which focus on close family. The moving “Purple Iris” looks back on a lost baby, who would now be ‘twenty-four next birthday – what a time/ for you’. The poet imagines meeting downstairs at four in the morning: ‘we’d share the one light from a fridge-door// over milk and cereal, and I will try and pull you close,/ ask where you’ve been all these nights,/ scaring us…’
I was struck by the fierce detail in “Lucien Freud Drawing His Dead Mother”: ‘The face is all, the sanctuary// of ruin. Black nostrils, empty snail shells. Blood/ pools below her skin. He crosshatches…’ There’s a brilliant line in which we see Freud at work: ‘forcing himself to draw,// motionless on the hard metal fact of his chair’.
Within the same section, Evans shows us a different kind of family in existential crisis at sea. “The Custom of the Sea” inhabits the characters involved in desperate late 19th century cannibalism.
They speak a psalm as ‘the blade sweeps the neck’, and the partaking men ‘grow a different shape, shadows twist behind their ribs…the slim wafer has burnt a hole in their tongues. / A rescuing captain, seeing their brandedness, says nothing.’
How we are marked by trauma is a theme this collection often explores. In “The Wolf’s Bite” (Lupus, an incurable chronic immune system illness), the moment of giving dreadful news is re-experienced –
Evans then evokes ‘the pack’
I found this a vivid and truthful account of such moments in memory, in the dreadful strength of imprinted minutes, and their accompanying, and re-visited internalised fear.
But this collection is also full of variety. In “101 Ways to Get Out of Bed (Abridged)”, we are offered in fact three, each of which will raise a smile. For example –
In conclusion, Evans points out there are another 98 more ways to ‘reflect on how to free yourself/ from the rack’ but ‘tea arrives by blue angel, and a sun raised on possibilities’.
The second section “The Anersphere”, explores, very broadly, issues of gender and (sometimes toxic) masculinity. In “Song of the Wild”, which opens the section, Ukrainian soldiers at the front are offered a visit to a sperm bank: ‘A dandelion seed/ flying into sun/… one lucky one clings to an egg wall/ the prize almost nothing/ while being it all’…
Then in an ambitious and engrossing long poem “An Invisible Fury”, the poet takes the yet-to-be-discovered 100+km of cave systems under northern England, and imagines the future. First comes ‘THE ACTION:’ in which stone bridges are blown apart ‘by a recipe from Asda’; and though no-one dies, there is ‘super-sizing terror’. And ‘In the National Park, there’s been no cool summers/ since 1996. We don’t remember/ or cancel this’. Then comes ‘THE ACTOR: Rachel is rid of male Sieg Heils and their New Balance trainers, / her new home a cave and her mortgage, the climate.’ After this ‘Rachel’ in ‘her own changing, she/they, sees the oil barons grow/ eight pairs of buttocks and shit black shit/ copiously out from each, upon our earth’.
In the last section of this long poem ‘THERE’S NO POSTSCRIPT TO APOCALYPSE:’
And in this way ‘the young fight the old, winning lawsuits’ – but no ‘Reparation swag’ will ‘hold bloated rivers long’. The poem’s final stanza is worth quoting in full, as it contains the collection title, and all the poet’s rage, disbelief, and incredulity.
The collection’s final section is “Americanicity”, in which the poems rip ferociously into the world of the super-rich and the madness which they normalise. “SpongeBob Lollipops All Over America” is about school shooters. And in “The Ts & Cs of Private Space Travel” the numbered points include:
We know the kind of venture he’s talking about. Meanwhile, and on the contrary, in “Ghosts of San Francisco” – ‘two guys shuffle by/ at the lights fidgety discuss the virtues/ of Whole Foods versus Walmart foil./ ‘Walmart rips, man, after one hit’.
Near the end of the collection is the beautiful poem “A Heat Mirage in the Navajo Desert”. Given all that’s going on in the US at the moment, this poem about the Nádleehi, born male but who function in the role of a woman – or born female but function as a man – strikes a sweet note against intolerance: ‘Nádleehi live their uncertainty/ happy uncaring/ of a single descriptor their gaze/ knowing change is/ always here.’
A Full-On Basso Profundo is a deeply-felt collection for right now. Ken Evans challenges, with craft and musicality, the state we’re in. A necessary book.