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The Ivy Hides the Fig-Ripe Duchess

The Ivy Hides the Fig-Ripe Duchess

9781854115461
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The Ivy Hides the Fig-Ripe Duchess is an exhilarating first collection of poetry from Welsh writer Ellie Evans. Using a surrealist palette of imagery and a tightly focused idiom, Evans takes us on strange journeys: to the post-apocalyptic world of the title poem, or into a skewed 18th-century Venice. These strange worlds are, as Marianne Moore once said of poetry, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”.

The reader obliquely unearths childhood trauma, fraught or intense relationships, and a singular delight in rebellion and escape. Poems like ‘Picnic with Earthquakes’ and ‘Jekyll Island, Georgia’ deftly align exotic locales (in Greece and the US) with intimate states of mind. There is also a fascination with art and history, and a palpable delight in technique: the book includes sonnets, a villanelle and triolets, and her concise free verse often employs rhyme, half-rhyme, and subtle alliteration.

Ellie Evans was born in Carmarthen and read English at Oxford. She worked in publishing and for the Medical Research Council, before living in Hong Kong, teaching English. She has spent most of her adult life teaching in London, but is now based in Powys. She began writing poetry six years ago, and has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University, where she is finishing a Ph.D. Her poems have been published in several anthologies and in magazines including Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, Red Poets, The Rialto and Acumen. Evans has given readings at the Bath Literature Festival, Bath Poetry Cafe, Dartington’s Ways with Words and The Muses’ Workshop on the Greek island of Spetses.