Jane Evans

Jane aims to make her poems accessible, but also a good read and musical to the ear. To this end, she uses well-tried devices like assonance, alliteration, changing rhythms, half-rhyme and internal rhyme, along with carefully placed line breaks. 'One of my preoccupations is to keep the "I" out of poems,' she says.

Poets she admires include: Hardy, 'for his delicate use of language and form'; Heaney, 'for the solidity of feeling beneath his extraordinary breadth of language'; and Auden, 'for his vision and craftsmanship with words and form'. '

What I like about all these poets,' she says, 'is that they developed a very individual syntax and "voice"'.

For the last ten years, Jane has been an active member of Ware Poets, who meet every month. She describes it as 'a lively and enthusiastic group, and a great place for mutual support and encouragement'. In 1995, Jane and Michael founded 'The White Horse Press', and on their home computer put together three collections entitled, Crosswords (1995), A Stack of Chairs (1997) and Loose Change (1999) to give to family and friends. In 2004, Rockingham Press published a 'slim volume' containing twenty-eight of Jane's more recent poems under the title  Stampede of Seconds.

During this period, three of Jane's poems appeared in Soundings, a journal of politics and culture whose poetry editor is Carole Satyamurti. Four other poems have been commended in various competitons. As well as her Plough Prize success, Jane achieved another joint third in 2004 with her Torbay Poetry Competition entry.