Ken Evans

Ken Evans’s collection is structured in three inter-locking and overlapping sequences: Family; Masculinity; and America. Subjects range from the personal sacrifice and meaning of an organ donation; the loss of a child in still-birth; the death of a friend through drink, as well as bigger themes of our constant wars and forebodings of climate collapse. But these poems also experience hope, humour and optimism shining through – and often co-existing with the darker themes, thus poems on the small vagaries and mishaps of our digital lives, of the money-anxieties of car maintenance, or of negotiating airport security with a replacement hip.

Formally-innovative, wildly-inventive, comic, surreal and poignant – Evans’s poetry is a restless delight as he tackles almost any subject from lost invoices, hearing aids, fruit flies, migration, bin lorries, bullet-pierced road signs, to love’s strains and pleasures. As entertaining as they are impressive, these poems are in and of the physical world, brimming with ideas and passion and sharing it all with real panache.

Poetry. Lyric or narrative in character, these poems are stitched through by the search for significance in the particular, whether at a train-station, draining a radiator, or eating chips, or on the alternative uses of Tipp-Ex, how not to take stairs, the joys of metal-detecting, or the vertigo of jet-lag. This sense of immanence below the surface, just beyond reach, is addressed through themes of family, memory, history, illness and recovery, travel, and exploration. This questioning, "sustained gaze," casts a steady, sombre eye over the everyday, but with care, candour and lightness, too.

After a life-time's teaching Classics to the Upper-Sixth, at a very minor Boy's Public School in Oxfordshire, the last of the 'DWEMs', as he likes to describe himself, believes that he is fighting a rear-guard action, defending and guarding a diminishing mythopoetic world view on which his own personal values, and those of Western Civilisation are built. And which are being cruelly tested, to breaking-point when he is called to 'support' one of his own 'favourite' ex-students who has been arrested for 'Terrorist Activities'. It is this, above all else which becomes the Circumstances of Departure; his own and of others, in one way or another.(DWEM was coined by Bernard Knox, to describe Classicists as a species: Dead White European Males.)

This introductory text provides an invaluable and accessible overview of the rapidly developing field of integrative psychotherapy, and offers a relational-developmental approach to theory and practice. The book goes beyond the confines of the therapy room and explores the significance of the cultural, ecological and transpersonal dimensions of therapy by critiquing the philosophical bases underpinning the theoretical model and looking at the nature of resistance in different phases of therapy. This textbook is essential to students needing a comprehensive introduction to integrative psychotherapy and will also be of interest to the seasoned practitioner.

This book is for database designers and database administrators using Visio, which is the database component of Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET for Enterprise Architects suite, also included in MSDN subscriptions. This is the only guide to this product that tells DBAs how to get their job done. Although primarily focused on tool features, the book also provides an introduction to data modeling, and includes practical advice on managing database projects. The principal author was the program manager of VEA's database modeling solutions.