“Splendidly various”

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

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“These are poems of such determination and energy, they manage not only to look into what’s broken or breaking in our civilisation but to coerce from the charged particles of language a subtext of awareness and empathy that is immensely encouraging. Katy Evans Bush has put her intelligence and wit to work without compromise.”
—Rachael Boast

“Instead of tricks and secrets, sweep and originality makes Broken Cities stand out. Katy Evans-Bush's joy, inventiveness and pleasure in the music of language really engages.”
—Ian Duhig

“On every page there is the strongest sense of being in the thick of the human crowd.”
—Annie Freud

“Katy Evans-Bush combines the intellectual rigour of the literary critic with the dynamism of a seasoned traveller in the blogosphere. These essays place poetry at the heart of contemporary culture, meeting at the borders it shares with music, politics and sculpture. She writes about art and life in a way that is generous, witty and incisive.

“It’s a thrill to read these essays from our foremost blogger. It’s testament to her talent and a validation of blogging in general. Flicking through these essays on Negative Capability, Dylan Thomas, plagiarism and poetic metre, Katy’s significant contribution to British and international poetry becomes clear.”
—John Field

“Egg Printing Explained is a dance of language: dramatic, comic and exuberant. What is especially dazzling is the cavalcade of forms and registers. The poems shift in mood and music from plain song to baroque, from blues to opera, and no reader will ever forget the exhilarating and brilliantly sustained ‘The Love Ditty of an ‘eartsick Pirate’. This is a sharply-written book from one of our sharpest wits. But it is also one of the most generous and melodic books of contemporary poetry I’ve read in some time.”
—David Morley

“This intimate voice, in this accomplished collection, points to an unbridled versatility… These are carefully managed poems, never experimental in any formal sense, yet the poet is evidently nourished by a ludic spirit which allows for a collision of registers, a promiscuity of styles, and boundless performative verve.”

—Julian Stannard

“For Henry, having two countries meant staged risk, and privacy. For Oscar, having the world meant everything bet on the one toss. In a 20's Modernist trope, this sequence hints at big unanalysed scandals by almost making them cockney rhyming slang: Evans-Bush shows us Two Great Late Victorians through the prism of the 1920s, even while she looks back 90 years at the Modernists, in a double manoeuvre.

”In literary judgment we think about sex, but in our own lives we think about love. An equal attention to Henry James and Oscar Wilde at once can illuminate both. Henry remains, at this stage, Evans-Bush's object of quiet love: touchstone to a vision of love that is the secret, and the secret joy of these poems.”
—Ira Lightman

“The most exciting news in contemporary poetry is not English or American but a mid-Atlantic, old-and-new-world marriage of the two, renewing the verbal contract. In her saucy, brilliant debut, Katy Evans-Bush proves one of the brightest offspring of this marriage. “I lashed myself to the texts of love,” she writes, “as if they were a raft.” When she reminds us, “Nothing is more dangerous than a weak imagination,” it reverberates with earned authority. She deserves to be read everywhere.”
—David Mason

“Katy Evans-Bush can tell an offbeat story the way you’ve never heard it before, but wanted to. Her ironised yet romantic fatalism is a model of wit and restrained emotion.”
—John Stammers

“Whilst anthologies often play up their diversity, the pleasure of 'the like of it' lies in the fact that these writers seem to be in conversation with each other, all working towards a mutual idea about what literature should be. They share sensuousness, a subtlety of line, an intelligent sense of humour and a seriousness about their art, born out of the knowledge that: ‘Nothing's real until you say it, and even then - / knowing how to do things with words can be terrible.' Inventive, well-read and wise, these Songs of Experience are a real treat for those who like their poetry grown-up.”
— Clare Pollard

Three in Blackbox Manifold

Three poems in my series ‘From Lines by Kenneth Patchen: #1, #15, #15

There, at the entrance to the other world,
every prospect looked tired.
He wanted to throw something
so he picked up a baseball.
It looked tired. The world, it said,
is too old. Too old for a home
run, it said, and added
you can’t run home…

Two Days before the Fall of Kabul (in The Honest Ulsterman)

On the examining table,
woman leaning into my back
as the hard end of her scanner
presses into my breastbone.

Looking for the sort of evidence
the body gives up to scrutiny.
Is the heart up to the forces
ranged against it. Or not…

Oft Have I Travelled

Evening light hits the garden like a paint bomb,
drenches the rusty gooseberry patch and the loganberries,
drowns the tumbledown flowers and the compost heap
with its surround of corroded metal grates
glowing orange — explodes, and throws its shrapnel
straight at my eyes. ..

The Love Ditty of an ’eartsick Pirate

It’s time we be goin’, me hearty, avast!
When the night’s nailed up its colours to its mast
Like some swab loaded to the gun’les ’n’ lashed to the plank;
Arr, make our way by th’ ghosty ports o’ call,
The bloody Triangle,
Quietin’ the parrots, kippin’ in dens of iniquity,
Where the scraps o’ the earth mixes with the scrapin’s o’ the sea:
Down alleys where ye argues if ye durst:
The forebodin’ of th’ accursed…

The Bog of Despair

We’d lunched on Greek salad and coffee
In a place with white walls and a skylight,
And when the guy in the corner’s phone
Went off in a polyphonic can-can
We laughed without even trying to hide it…

Three poems on Peony Moon

from ‘Hammershøi’:

ii.
Interior, With Coffeepot

The other chair is pushed away
as if the artist had been sitting on it;
a coffee pot hovers on the table.
There is a woman there, and one cup.
‘Not only is the artist,’ he says, ‘a child.’
‘He is an only child.’ His wife sits by herself.
He sits by himself. They are joined together
by the two ends of the brush.