Formally-innovative, wildly-inventive, comic, surreal and poignant – Evans’s poetry is a restless delight as he tackles almost any subject from lost invoices, hearing aids, fruit flies, migration, bin lorries, bullet-pierced road signs, to love’s strains and pleasures. As entertaining as they are impressive, these poems are in and of the physical world, brimming with ideas and passion and sharing it all with real panache.

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This is poetry with energy and vision, displaying a forensic accuracy of metaphor and image to deliver writing which disturbs, delights and moves the reader, often all at once.

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To An Occupier Burning Holes is above all a well-observed collection, in which Evans seems to “really see” what he writes about, yet here he acknowledges the limits of language and poetry. Within these confines, though, this is a poet who uses his considerable craft to treat of themes and issues in a carefully personal way. Overall, an individual and distinctive collection.

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There’s a difficulty in reviewing a collection of poems in which the perspective shifts between an ostensibly dispassionate survey of international crises and the intimacy of human and family relationships, especially when the poet also displays considerable formal variety in response to the themes he explores. Yet the world as it is now seems to demand our attention, while our nearest connections, if we are fortunate, draw out our capacity for warmth and, inevitably, grief at loss. Ken Evans’ new collection spans this wide range and a review can give only a small flavour of the variety within.