There is an exceptional current of linguistic music that careens beneath Anna Evans’ poetry of irrepressible desire and botched relationships that give her work its unique, luxuriant power of insight and acceptance. One suspects this is owed to her Britishness, and a sound education in metrical poetry. But I believe she simply possesses a wicked awareness of how the tide of human feeling and emotions is best conveyed in the rhythmic rising and fallings of language. There are no feints of meaning or idiosyncratic associative leaps, but rather delightful melodic structures that lead us to either the complex image of children horrified at the sight of a whale whose attack of a young woman Evans intentionally alludes to Yeats’ famous poem Leda & The Swan, or to the deceptive emblem of “camouflage” in that closing couplet of “The Professionals,” sonically cinched and comes to our ears as an indispensable maxim. In her poem “The Mistress,” Evans delves into the states of unseemliness, areas of unacceptable human behavior that others would quickly dismiss as unsettling or depraved. However, the poem avoids refusal by doing the hard work of emancipating us from our superior moral stances and providing a psychological portrait that invites empathy and imagination. She is quick to explore the complex interrelationships of lovers and spouses, and the transactions of uncertainty and submission that occur between them. Such poems survive because they disquiet the mind but also sing their intricate dimensions.