Reviews

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Summary of a review of The Zoo Keeper by Catherine Smith, The New Writer Magazine.

The Zoo Keeper is also startling and original, intellectually challenging without having this reader reaching for the gin. Not so much a voice as voices in this collection, from a poet prepared to take risks and push language to the limits. The book also features photographs by Camilla Stapleton-Hibbert, which resonate spookily with some of the imagery, and are also fascinating in their own right.

Cover Quotes for The Zoo Keeper

You get the same whack off these poems as you do when reading Juvenal, or Simon Armitage. I would definitely buy this.
Martin Newell, The Independent

A handsome book . . . Richard Evans is talented, intellgent and sensitive.
George Szirtes, winner of the T.S. Eliot medal for poetry

These poems and photgraphs make an unusual and effective combination, creating a world that is honest in its unease, and negotiating it with imaginative zest and a wry humour.
Roger Garfitt

Review of The Zoo Keeper by poet Joel Stickley (Aisle 16) from UEA newspaper, Concrete.

The first book to come out of the Norwich-based Egg Box Publishing is an elegantly dark collection of poetry and photographs. Anyone who's come across The Egg Box magazine wil recognise the aesthetic - a heady cocktail of all that is macabre, thoughtful and weird. From the photograph on the front cover (a mummified cat held by the neck) to the final poem (a 'translation' of non-existent ancient scrolls) The Zoo Keeper delights in walking fine lines between disgust and fascination, reality and invention, comedy and tragedy.

Corporate image aside, though, The Zoo Keeper also contains some damn good poetry. You would be hard-pressed to find another debut collection which has the assurance and charisma found in poems such as 'On Discovering Your Lover Has Nits', 'When it Rains' and the excellent 'Prophetess'. Here are poems that manage to be at once tender, vicious, and playful; they ground themselves in an often bitter reality whilst escaping into a world that is free, open and personal. Evans seems fascinated by physicality, and is at his best when he lets the poems become saturated with tactile images. Some of the pieces here are impossible to read without shuddering, and some will bring you to an involuntary halt; you may need to get up and walk around for a while beofre reading the next one. This is poetry as it should be, red in tooth and claw.

That is not to say that The Zoo Keeper is hard to read. Quite the opposite - it slips down with all the ease of an innocent looking white pill. There is a lightness of touch here, a fierelt wry wit that loves to play with ideas until they start to break, then discards them. The voice is considered, playful and utterly compulsive. Upon reaching the last page and closing the book, you will immediately regret having finished. Evans has a style that looks likely to ripen over time, and with such a strong debut under his belt, we eagerly anticipate further collections. Of course, until then, there's always Egg Box magazine.

Amazon Customer review of The Zoo Keeper *****

This is quite simply a fantastic book. If you are bored of poems that promise but don't deliver or words that just wash over you uselessly then this book is the wake-up-slap-in-the-face-open-you-eyes poetry book you've been looking for. It's deeply involving without being a big effort to read, it's fantastically original and yet still seems as if the words 'should' be as they are. If you like intriguing oxymorons and fascinating asides slipped in amongst vast impressive images then this is it.