A Gymnast of Form
by Nicole Caruso Garcia
Writing poetry in form is like doing cartwheels in an elevator, but Anna M. Evans is always up to the challenge. Her strong, clear voice makes her work come alive—especially the inventive persona poems—and although she is perhaps best known for her sonnets, she expertly delivers dozens of other forms, making her books a gateway drug to formalism. It’s impossible to choose just one hallmark of her writing; there is too much to admire. (Full disclosure: Anna and I are friends and serve together on the executive board of Poetry by the Sea, so I would feel ridiculous referring to her as “Evans.”)
Anna’s work is characterized by serious attention to craft, yet she doesn’t take herself too seriously. Given that po-biz often can be stuffy and hierarchical, a poet as down-to-earth as Anna—both in person and on the page—is refreshing. Her wit is evident in her feature in this issue, but her body of work strikes a range of chords: clever, evenhanded (yes, even despite many political barbs), feminist, humorous, imaginative, playful, poignant, sultry. Above all, Anna’s voice is natural and unpretentious.
Her humor is often wry, as in the final couplet of the comic sonnet “Melania’s TV,” when the then-First Lady tersely declares, “I’m brittle as a woman made of chalk. / I put red lipstick on. We do not talk.” Melania is cuddly as a pillar of salt and switches from Fox to CNN when Donald isn’t around. And speaking of fraudsters, “The Confidence Man” is a non-comic poem in Anna’s collection about the Titanic, yet it reminds readers that some folks may find irony and dark humor even in direst circumstances. The speaker uses the disaster to fake his own death, confessing that “wrapped in a shawl, [he] got on another boat.” It is not his womanly disguise that is funny, but rather, his lemons-to-lemonade glee as he muses, “So, thank God for our mishap with the ice. Here comes New York, a con man’s paradise.” Anna often deploys such sardonic humor at the end of a poem—whether comic or non-comic—giving readers a well-timed wink. I equally love the moments she gives us a breathtaking and poignant closing couplet. And don’t miss the opportunity to hear Anna in person if you can; she is a dynamic live performer.
An intrepid practitioner of form, Anna loves it not only for its versatile range of vessels that could be apt for holding a given idea, but for form’s undisputed effect on the creative process. She embraces Picasso’s notion that “forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention.” Likewise, Anna values freedom, eschewing form for form’s sake. Part of the fun for her is carefully choosing the shape and size of her container, espousing the view of formalists such as Rhina P. Espaillat and Marilyn Nelson who avow that form provides a safe container for holding difficult ideas, volatile material. Anna does this especially well in her collection about the Titanic.
To a degree, Anna is a confessional poet, but whose confession is it, anyway? Anna writes populated poems, brimming with figures from history, news, or her own experience. Whether comic or tragic, her persona poems come alive. Her advantage when it comes to crafting these may stem from mutation, as in real life she wears multiple hats, some of which she dons in poems. In the p’s alone, she’s a parent, partner, pet owner to Piper the blind dog, poet, politician, professor, president of a poetry conference. I admire her ability to bring her cast of characters to life and deftly shapeshift between them and her own identity.
In the highly imaginative sonnet collection Sisters and Courtesans (White Violet Press, 2014), Anna introduces readers to an array of personas, giving voice to nuns and prostitutes throughout history, spanning multiple continents.
Anna always delights live audiences, but when she’s reading from this collection especially, you can tell she’s having a great time, adopting a demure French accent for “My Life as a French Carmelite Nun,” or Cockney dialect for another favorite of mine, “My Life as a Victorian Streetwalker”:
It wasn’t wot I dreamed of as a kid—
I thought I’d get the factory or the mill—
but ruddy Barry knocked me up, he did,
an’ then the baby kept on falling ill.
I share a basement with a girl called Nell,
an’ we take turns to go an’ earn the rent.
Most of the blokes are ugly or they smell,
though every now and then you get a gent.
I mostly think about me little boy,
not God or punishment for mortal sin.
‘E is the only thing that brings me joy,
an’ wot’s the point? There’s no way I can win.
I’m up against the wall or on me back,
an’ either way the next one might be Jack.
It has been said that a well-written sonnet snaps shut at the end, and I love how this poem does just that, juxtaposing the speaker’s resignation against the coiled potential energy of Jack ripping open his next victim. A snappy ending like a knockout punch.
The poems breathe with vivid detail and personalities that feel true to life. In “My Life as an Aztec Sacrifice,” when we are told, “People adore me, touch my skin and hair, / push golden bangles onto both my wrists…I will never feel as loved, as worshipped, as I do tonight,” we feel unease and sympathy for the speaker who is “still breathing as the people start / to cheer the priest who lifts [her] burning heart.”
Anna makes sustaining a collection of sonnets look effortless, and she is equally surefooted when somersaulting from form to form, as she does in her subsequent book.
In Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic (Able Muse Press 2018), Anna performs a different type of conjuring. She draws on history again, using the disaster as a periscope lens to first explore events and figures within the doomed ship’s history and lore, then personal and family relationships, ultimately navigating the grief and loss that is central to the book: her mother’s fatal illness.
The collection opens with “Sister Ships,” a clever mirror sonnet that ominously juxtaposes the Olympic and the Titanic, two “unsinkable” flagships that are “the epitome of luxury in design,” each “a jewel.”
Speaking of jewels, over a dozen different forms follow, all carefully cut and polished, including abecedarian, blues poem, found poem, ghazal, monorhyme, pantoum, paradelle, rondeau, sapphic, sestina, sonnet crown, triolet, tritina, and villanelle. To boot, for the poem “Under Class,” Anna has invented the “haikoum,” a poem constructed of stanzas that are a series of haiku, with lines repeating in a pantoum-like pattern. The speaker refuses to abandon her husband and get on a lifeboat, and the poem owes its effectiveness partly to its short lines—”In the name of God”—and repetition—“Can anybody hear us?”—that create a kind of choppy disorientation, as if with each line the woman were coming up for air, a gulping effect akin to drowning, “[her] mouth full of brine.”
As Titanic passengers begin to recede and personal relationships come into greater focus, Anna reminds us of a universal truth: No one is immune to grief and loss, as in “Ghosts”:
We all have our ghosts. For you the worst month
is July. Sunshine, fireworks. Your nephew jumped off a bridge.
How can you stand the celebrations when you’re down?
Titanic lies on the sea bed, twelve-thousand feet down,
found in 1985 on the first day of the ninth month.
Divers have now swum through the bridge
and the smoking room where the men played bridge.
Don’t ask what your nephew thought on the way down.
We resign ourselves to the ghosts of the month.
Every month Titanic’s bridge sinks further down.
In isolation, the poem’s last line can be read as a simple fact, but Anna uses it as the keystone in this tight tritina form, creating tension out of being pulled in two directions—by our ghosts that keep resurfacing, and the sunken Titanic and its ceaseless sinking.
Similarly, illness can be slow and relentless. Under Dark Waters culminates in an impressive sonnet crown redoublé, “A Wreath for Rosie Gray,” the mother at the heart of the book. The crown begins:
There is a moment right before disaster
when everything is perfect. I can see
Titanic forging through the ice field, faster
than any ship before her. Then there’s me,
observing the date, about to call my father.
We’re so wrapped up in things, we hardly know
with lives this trouble-free, we ought to rather
pause them if we could, or take them slow.
But time continues its relentless pace,
events unfold in fixed and linear motion.
Never again, that smile upon my face
before I dial their number. There’s an ocean
of grief before us, not quite yet in sight.
The well-lit ship speeds onward in the night.
How often we speed onward, unawares. How fitting to pair the sinking of one of the most famous and doomed vessels of all time with our mortal human vessel. And how effective to do it in form, the sturdy vessel to safely carry such emotionally heavy cargo. Although the subject matter is weighty, form is Anna’s wheelhouse, and her dexterity gives a grace and weightlessness to her work. I had the pleasure of reading this collection on a train bound for Belfast, which made my visit to its world-class Titanic museum all the more affecting.
Although Anna is a poet of history, she is also a poet of our modern moment. British by birth, she is a U.S. citizen who has been living in the States for more than twenty years. Her keen interest in local and national politics informs and inspires her most recent chapbook, The Unacknowledged Legislator (No Chair Press, 2019), as she bolsters Percy Bysshe Shelley’s assertion that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
Anna illuminates issues ripped from the headlines, such as consumerism, the environment, the #metoo movement, politics, and school shootings. Her perspective varies from persona (“Melania’s TV”) to fly-on-the-wall (“On Seeing Two Girls Wearing Full Burqua in Forever 21”) to boots-on-the-ground (“The Armed Teacher”).
There are some autobiographical poems from Anna the concerned citizen, but also from her alter ego, Committeewoman Evans, elected in the New Jersey town where she resides. In “Campaign Underdog” she says, “I have a map of Hainesport in my head, / I’ve crunched its acorns underfoot all fall,” a nod to season upon season of indefatigable campaigning. She concludes, “people shake their heads and ask me why, / but those who love me know I can’t not try.”
Despite jabs at a certain former president and his party of pachyderms, Anna makes deliberate efforts not to dwell in an echo chamber. (She has said, “I watch Fox News so you don’t have to.”) This attempt at some evenhandedness comes across in “The Divided State of America”:
I wonder how they sleep at night, those folk
who disagree with me. Although their views
are driving current policy, the joke
is on them when they watch the nightly news
and see the protest rallies everywhere—
each witty hat, each cutely-worded sign.
Aren’t they ashamed? Do they not even care
the country will remember them as swine?
But then I see they think the same of me:
that they’re the strong, while my kind are all flakes.
Impossible for either side to see
the other’s merits or their own mistakes.
By day, we all shake our self-righteous heads;
at night we lie uneasy in our beds.
There is much of Anna’s work to look forward to, in all sorts of forms. Her upcoming collection, States of Grace, boasts a title poem that is a (highly political) sonnet crown nominated by Rattle for the Pushcart Prize—and its attempt to extend an olive branch across the aisle is part of its appeal. Additionally, Anna is at work on a series of odes for people under each zodiac sign. (Think “Acrostic for an Aquarius,” “Canzone for a Capricorn,” “Skeltonic for a Scorpio.”) A dozen poems sure to delight. I propose that we call them—you guessed it—zodes!
Anna teases in her recent poem “Why Are Your Poems So Unlike You?”: “I like to write as one adored or hated, / a mistress or a siren, not a wife. / And then there’s this small possibility— / you only think you know the real me.” Whether an Anna M. Evans poem is comically irreverent, playful and sexy, or haunting and poignant, it is impeccably crafted.