Jack’s new work always reminds me of that quiet territory that lies between dream and memory. It’s music overheard while half asleep or like that scene from Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander where the mother is talking to the dead son. It’s a continual witnessing of the moment but as it slips away like smoke or as it echoes into other places.
—Tracy Thomas,author of Runes
Ever sensitive to what is happening around him, Jack Evans casts a wide gaze and picks out details that always register as being just right for the poem. There is a range from humor to noir here, and a delicious sense for a lyric that appeals to the senses as effectively as it reflects a generous spirit. The moments of religious illumination never weigh heavily on the reader, and have a universal ring to them. This is the kind of poet who leaves you feeling you’d enjoy his company as much as his writing.
—David Chorlton, author of Bird on a Wire and A Field Guide to Fire
With the eyes of painter and "the heart of a juggler," Jack Evans’ new collection, Rain is the Hourglass of Memory, captures the "debris of history" in all its glorious detail, vacillating between his cinematic wanderings and his fleeting meditations, his revelations of secrets—miracles, bells, skin, tongue, "the ragged breaths of passing time"—and his lingering reflections on the scraps of culture that compose his lyrical landscape. Most importantly, he repeatedly guides the reader into a space of finality, where the fragments are being shored and the sounds of jazz are dancing across the water into a perpetual sunset…and then you discover that “distance is myth,” that “we [can] paint God inside our eye” and tell the story over again.
This is the kind of collection that can only be birthed from intensity and silence, a space in which the holiness of Evans’ wisdom compels the reader to become an acolyte.
—Rosemarie Dombrowski, author of The Book of Emergencies and The Philosophy of Unclean Things