Nights on the Line by M.S. Evans
Published by Black Bough Poetry

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Review by Corinna Board

In Nights on the Line, M.S. Evans invites us to accompany her on an intimate and often perilous journey across the landscapes of memory. Each stop takes the form of a masterfully-crafted imagist poem. These are precise snapshots; dense with emotion and deeply rooted in the natural world.

This connection to nature becomes clear from the opening poem My Bedroom Window. The Bigleaf Maple with its ‘protective branches’ appears to us as an almost motherlike figure. Trees are never far away in Evans’s debut collection; there are sequoias, maple alders and redwoods watching over her along the way.  In Unfoundling, she becomes ‘attuned to the mood of maples’ and seeks shelter ‘under a dogwood’, and in Cedar Park, Seattle,  Red Cedars keep watch like arboreal guardians. Nature is a source of solace and beauty, guiding us through the darkest, coldest nights, speaking to us in the ‘ancient language’ (Snow Comes).

In spite of the healing and protective forces of the natural environment, Evans’s journey is far from easy. Being a girl is considered a weakness by some of the toxic masculine characters she encounters on her travels. In No is Feminine, ‘only boys get to say no’ but  Evans sets out to prove that this is untrue: ‘Men assume / they’re tougher/ it’s a given, / I’d skin them: / hang their flesh from / fruit trees.’

Another recurring theme is that of cultural identity, from the painfully beautiful Polish Mother Bones to poems such as Llennyrch or Butte with its ‘Welsh words, half-forgotten’.

The collection ends on the poem Heaven, where Evans’s Babcia is waiting, and while this particular journey may have come to an end, I am left with the certainty that Evans’s poetic adventure has only just begun.

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M.S. Evans is a Pushcart-nominated poet and BoTN-nominated visual artist currently based in Montana. Her work has been published in Ice Floe Press, Black Bough Poetry, Green Ink Poetry, and Anti-Heroin Chic, among others. She is the author of Nights on the Line (Black Bough Poetry, 2022).