Paul Evans, THE DOOR OF TALDIR (Selected Poems)

A brief personal tribute, and my review of this posthumous Selected of Paul Evans (1945-1991), was published by Rupert Loydell @ http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/. The poems for this collection were chosen by Robert Sheppard, who also writes a decent enough introduction. The publisher is Tony Frazer (Shearsman Books). Unfortunately, none of the poems Paul was writing during the last five years of his life are included in this rather small Selected, and the editor waffles on some, rationalizing why he didn't include an earlier poem,  "Dark &" in this text. However, the book, despite its failures, and the omission of the last poems, gets my highest possible recommendation since all of Evans' other published books are out-of-print.  In his essay "Paul Evans: A Book, Two Meetings And A Dream" published in THE EMPTY HILL (memories and praises of Paul Evans), edited by Peter Bailey and Lee Harwood, Skylark Press, 1992, Ian Robinson writes: "The light of his personality has gone, of course, but the light from the poems he wrote shines on: they shed a light over those of us who are left." Here are two lyrics not included in the Selected, the first a "Poem improvised on the back cover of O.I.N.C." is dedicated to Lee Harwood, his good friend, and published in the final issue of Branch Redd Review (2002). What's that pale splotch (yellow) seen from a train five forty-five p.m. to London (again) I swear I almost caught the last primrose of late spring. He did right smack down the lens of a shining periscope the large Texan next to me in the buffet-car festooned with "sensitive equipment" ah Lee this is not the Brighton Belle I'm not a tripper and my heart's not here there goes a bluebell wood Life, it is true has not turned out as I expected the second poem is titled "let me explain (courtesy of Thomas De Quincey) (1834)" "it is a great misfortune, at least it is a great peril, to have tasted the enchanted cup of youthful rapture incident to the poetic temperament. That standard of highly-wrought sensibility once made human experientially, it is rare to see a submission afterwards to the sobrieties of daily life." yes, purple and impassioned prose! it is to you I turn to lose my tedious self as in a mist (footsteps of Leon Janacek I adore) as in the mist through which, one dawn the soft body of the Downs came clear and in the hollow east of Clayton that white house appeared glimmering there in a light I knew would spill if I should breathe And so I breathed destroying as I must the shape of everything I love