Steve Evans' new collection, The Crow on the Cross, Wedding Songs & Others, is collection which examines the social and cultural phenomenon of marriage in ways that are equal parts personal and analytical. His poems are both lush and spare. The endless human desire for a partner, an equal, is celebrated and questioned in poems of deep understanding and knowing humour. Evans brings all his formidable skill as a poet to a remarkably diverse examination of the topic, at once deeply thoughtful, comfortingly familiar, and perceptively humorous. This mastery of form is continued in the second part of the collection, a miscellany of subjects united by the skill and insight of an accomplished poet.