The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For April, we are delighted to publish three new works by P. C. Evans. The first of these, ‘Selection’, is published today with two more poems to follow at the weekend. The accompanying photographs are by the photographer and artist, David Street.

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Selection

 

If there are two strands of thought

That would wind together

To temper a mind

Coming to consciousness

In that Welsh mining town

In the eighties,

They were Keats’ and Bobby Sands’.

 

So it felt incongruous to find

Myself crossing The Strand

From Charing Cross to Piccadilly,

And on to St. James’s Street,

Where Major Herbert and I

Had arranged to meet

At Brooks’s club to discuss

My commission to the regiment.

 

Inside the Palladian Portland pile,

The cadets around the colonel’s table

Were as vacant as Matryoshkas,

Except for a Cambridge Divinity grad

Who listened patiently

As the major sold us

The Fusiliers’ alumni,

Of Graves, Sassoon, Hedd Wyn and David Jones.

 

As the cadets drank the colonel’s wine,

We listened to them try

To outshine each other

In their eagerness to serve

In Belfast or in Londonderry.

When the senior officers withdrew,

Their bigotry grew

As they held kangaroo court on Stalker

And shoot to kill.

Soon these cadets would deploy

To Ulster, rather than form

The junior officer corps of Desert Storm.

 

But as for the Divinity grad and I,

We opted out at the Lichfield barracks,

Leaving Sandhurst for the birds –

I hope he’ll have gone on to finish his PHD

On Cardinal Newman,

And now be occupying a diocese –

But not before the major

Took me out to the King’s Head

To sound me out

About my political views.

The British army has a longer perspective

Than politicians habitually do,

It is the instrument of the state par excellence;

Better not hawk it, then,

Our intelligence and imagination,

But leave command

To that blind and brutal band,

The dependable, blue-collar cadets.

 

P.C. Evans is a Welsh poet, writer and translator of poetry, novels and drama, resident in Amsterdam. His latest publications are Grand Larcenies (Carcanet) and The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street (Scribe).