Marine Objects/Some Language, Suzannah V. Evans

Marine Objects / Some Language (Guillemot Press) are interlinked pamphlets by Suzannah V. Evans, exquisitely putting the sea onto paper. Marine Objects (pictured) is a sequence of poems based on the artist Eileen Agar’s sculpture Marine Object (1939), using repetition and a gradual development of language and themes to build up like barnacles on the page. Both pamphlets are beautifully illustrated by Chloe Bonfield, the paper feels smooth as a pebble and the colours are of those washed up onto the shore half polished, still being worked by the sea.

Evans shares Agar’s description of collage both in the acknowledgements of Marine Objects and in within its poem Balancing and Barnacled, as ‘a form of inspired correction, a displacement of the banal by the fertile intervention of chance or coincidence’.

Suzannah V. Evans has published poems in PN Review, The London Magazine, Magma, and elsewhere, with others broadcast on BBC Radio Bristol and longlisted for the 2019 and 2018 Ivan Juritz Prize. She has read her work at Keats House, London, where she organised Keats House: New Poets, for York Literature Festival, and at Underfall boatyard in Bristol, where she was poet in residence in 2019. She is Reviews Editor for The Compass, a reviewer for the TLS, and an AHRC-funded doctoral researcher at Durham University.