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ISBN 978-0-9859-4681-4

David Allan Evans’ vision is virtually limitless. Born of the great expanse of South Dakota and touching locales as distant as Mexico, China and the Isle of Man, Evans expression of that vision is as subtle as it is encompassing. The Carnival, The Life is a meditation on a life well lived.

MAGIC

It’s about time I said this
(my mother gone 30 years):
not quite all of the sting has gone out of
that after-midnight scene in our house
on the railroad bluff over half a century ago.

It started with a stubborn defiance
of curfew one too many nights,
and then my being sure that I could slip
in as quietly as a burglar. And yet I
didn’t expect to see the rough lath
in her hand as she stood just inside
the kitchen door—or the fury in her eyes.

It’s magical, the way some wounds —
on thighs, on knees or in the heart—
can keep on stinging for so many years,
and yet even as they’re stinging,
healing with forgiveness.

—from “the Carnival, the Life” by David Allan Evans

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The following conversation between poets Louie Skipper and Dennis Sampson took place in the fall of 1998 at Sweet Briar College in Amherst, Virginia, where Sampson was the Margaret Bannister Writer in Residence. The core of this discussion is Skipper’s sensibility as evident in his poetry and, more specifically, its expression in Skipper’s first full length collection of poems... Watch the interview