Vespula Vanishes

 

Vespula Vanishes is a new A C Evans poetry collection published Inclement Publishing (edited by Michelle Foster) in a limited edition of twenty copies. Here is a recent review notice by Steve Sneyd from Data Dump 118, Feb. 2008.

VESPULA VANISHES AND OTHER POEMS Inclement (Poetry for the Modern Soul), 2007 Limited Edition

Vespula Vanishes is dedicated to Tori Amos* and tells of a lady come ‘out of the light’, finding the elegant world she could not articulate a day place that ‘ignored her pain’, and via twilight longings this ‘ghostly shape of desire’ dissolved ‘into the night’. Is this title poem of A C Evans’ latest collection decadent psychological portrait or evocation of other (worldly) woman? Of the 25 poems here many raise similar questions as to the boundary condition/genre definition, intriguingly some are predominantly urban or other urban/social/mental decay evocations, and a few are niche-able as more clearly genre, including Lust For A Vampire (Mircalla) her ‘breasts running with gore’, the Dark Tower-set Slave Mask ‘A face I can trust because/ I cannot see your pain./Do you understand why I/ Lick your wounds tonight?’ etc being DF, while there is at least a trace of Sfnal, e.g. Lost Words with its ‘closed sphere’ holding a world last of ‘resplendent/dying/suns’, Only Shadows’ ‘failing star’ (ACE sharing Clark Ashton Smith’s love of star death imagery) and, in the enigmatic post-Surreal definitions of Reflections In A Mirror, alongside those for ‘closed syllable’ and ‘sympiesometer’ is ‘Jupiter’ as ‘an organic arabesque’ and ‘intellect’ as a ‘new type of space’, though the payoff is back to decadent psychology with ‘sacrament…morbid fear of light’.
* Whose only UK No 1 hymned the darkside figure of the ‘Professional Widow’

The poem Slave Mask from Vespula Vanishes also appeared in the collection Dark Tower 3 The Black Throne (2007) from Atlantean Publishing (edited by D J Tyrer) who published Fractured Muse, a previous collection from A C.

A review of Vespula Vanishes & Other Poems by Eve Kimber of Pulsar Poetry Webzine can be found here