Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic

by Anna M. Evans

Overview

In Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic, Anna M. Evans juxtaposes the recent loss of her mother with comparable elements and incidents from the 1912 disaster. Evans traces an intricate trajectory from glory to grief by means of vividly imagined details about the people and animals on board the ill-fated ship, along with evidence that the operators’ blunders were avoidable. This is poetry of impressive artistry and formal mastery, with Evans in complete command of theme and craft. Under Dark Waters is a unique and spellbinding collection, and deservedly, the runner-up for the 2017 Able Muse Book Award.

PRAISE FOR UNDER DARK WATERS: SURVIVING THE TITANIC:

Anna M. Evans is one of the best practitioners of the sonnet and the sonnet series. Her series on the Titanic is one of the most memorable I have ever read. The technical difficulty of the poem is noteworthy, but it is the construction of the book, based on that poem as a centerpiece, that is genius.
    – Kim Bridgford, author of Undone

An earlier feminist poet went “diving into the wreck” of personal experience and gender politics. Now comes Anna M. Evans, diving into the wreck of the Titanic to illuminate both personal experience and the politics of social class. Working at the height of her remarkable poetic powers, Evans fuses the historical voyage of the doomed luxury liner with the personal (her mother’s fatal illness) and the political (class inequality, resonating with our own disastrous era). The result is one of the best, most unforgettable books I have read in years.
    – Julie Kane, author of Paper Bullets

Despite the great accomplishment of [Evans’s] technical tours de force, it is not admiration for technique that is the main feeling that stays with a reader once the book is finished, rather it is the undeniably powerful emotional force of what is being said.
    – Dick Davis (from the foreword), author of Love in Another Language

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College, and is the editor of the Raintown Review. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists’ Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County.
  Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic was the runner-up for the 2017 Able Muse Book Award.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781773490120
Publisher:	Able Muse Press
Publication date:	05/28/2018
Pages:	82
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Anna M. Evans' poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College, and is the editor of the Raintown Review. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists' Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County. UNDER DARK WATERS: SURVIVING THE TITANIC was the runner-up for the 2017 Able Muse Book Award.

Table of Contents

vi Acknowledgments

vii Foreword

I

5 Sister Ships

6 Attempting the First Six-Day Crossing

7 Titanic Bill of Lading (Partial)

8 Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan

9 Distress Signals

11 And the Band Was Playing Ragtime

12 Titanic Blues

13 A Tune to Remember

14 Chief Baker Charles Joughin and His Whisky

15 Three Captains’ Tales

18 Under Class

20 The Lord’s Prayer on Collapsible B

22 Animals of the Titanic

23 Life Cycle of the Iceberg

24 Sinking a Few

25 The Confidence Man

26 The Unsinkable Molly Brown

27 “God Himself Could Not Sink This Ship”

29 Paradelle for the Wreck

30 In Memory of the Titanic

34 Curse of the Titanic, I

35 Curse of the Titanic, II – Madeleine Astor

36 A Meditation on Loss

II

39 Entering the Ice Field

40 On Watching James Cameron’s Titanic While Pregnant with My Second Child

41 On Visiting the Titanic Exhibition in Vegas with My Teenage Daughters

42 My Father and I, and Our Wine

43 I Made Mistakes yet More Could Have Been Done

45 Casualties of Fast Living

46 Ghosts

47 Titanic Month

III

51 A Wreath for Rosie Gray

Editorial Reviews

Anna M. Evans is one of the best practitioners of the sonnet and the sonnet series. Her series on the Titanic is one of the most memorable I have ever read. The technical difficulty of the poem is noteworthy, but it is the construction of the book, based on that poem as a centerpiece, that is genius.

    – Kim Bridgford, author of Undone

An earlier feminist poet went “diving into the wreck” of personal experience and gender politics. Now comes Anna M. Evans, diving into the wreck of the Titanic to illuminate both personal experience and the politics of social class. Working at the height of her remarkable poetic powers, Evans fuses the historical voyage of the doomed luxury liner with the personal (her mother’s fatal illness) and the political (class inequality, resonating with our own disastrous era). The result is one of the best, most unforgettable books I have read in years.

    – Julie Kane, author of Paper Bullets

Despite the great accomplishment of [Evans’s] technical tours de force, it is not admiration for technique that is the main feeling that stays with a reader once the book is finished, rather it is the undeniably powerful emotional force of what is being said.

    – Dick Davis (from the foreword), author of Love in Another Language

From the Publisher