Comments on Adam Chiles' first collection Evening Land:

2008-04-24T06:25:00.000-07:00

Spirited along by variations on David Hockney's East Yorkshire oil
paintings, Adam Chiles' Evening Land is of battered earth and psyche,
"dark ginnel," and glockened land," where "a man is forgiving his hand
for losing its fingers." Chiles has written winter figures steeled
against "everything gagged and prisoned." This is a first book by a
seriously adult poet.

Jane Miller

In Adam Chiles' poems, the painter meets the painted. The stranger
discovers new lands. The morning touches night. Things find new
and surprising orders. This book is fresh and revelatory -- Chiles
has his finger on the pulse while he also knows the depth of our
wounds. A fantastic new voice in poetry.

Colum McCann

These intensely taut and gorgeous lyrics of Chiles' Evening Land are poems written in exile. His is a chosen exile, though, a banishment of the physical rather than political. In this kingdom of memory and field, marsh and war, language finds solace in the grammar of landscape. … Chiles' heart is buried with his true home. For once, we should be glad of exile. Never has distance from one's homeland created such important, stunning work.

-Joshua Poteat

The poem "Lazarus Field" from Chiles "Evening Land" turns a whisper into a blade, that blade into a street,its children onto a battlefield,and spinning us through to a burnt clearing. It will break you back to fog.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson