“An amphora like an ampersand found in the sand”: Found Objects as Traces of Memory in Suzannah V. Evans’s Poetry

Abstract

This article focuses on contemporary British poet Suzannah V. Evans’s pamphlets Marine Objects / Some Language (2020) and Brightwork (2021). In her work unfolds an intertextual and intermedial poetics of the found object, which is in dialogue with the modernist and avant-garde experimentation with objects as catalysts of spectral memory, as well as more generally with literary and artistic tradition. Marine Objects is an ekphrastic sequence inspired by an assemblage by Surrealist artist Eileen Agar titled Marine Object (1939), featuring a broken antique amphora, some crustaceans, a ram’s horn, and a starfish. The second part of the pamphlet, Some Language, makes an analogy between the Surrealist practice of assemblage and the obsession for found objects that haunts the character of Virginia Woolf’s short story “Solid Objects” (1918). However, the complex network of meta-poetic images suggests that in Evans’s work, words themselves function as found objects and are often spliced in enigmatic assemblages. Evans’s most recent pamphlet Brightwork, written during a residency at Underfall Yard, a boatyard in Bristol, also explores the links between words and things, but this time engaging with the legacy of French poetry, particularly Apollinaire’s calligrams and Francis Ponge’s collection of prose poems Le Parti pris des choses (1942). In Evans’s poetic practice, marine objects become catalysts conjuring up various kinds of memory—an impersonal memory carried by the sea, more personal traumatic memories, and finally a collective intertextual literary and artistic memory.