Ashes to Ashes

When retired statistician Emlyn Evans died in Pennsylvania in 1995, his sons discovered over 200 notebooks in which Evans had carefully recorded falls and patterns of dust in his home and surrounding outbuildings. A college professor friend of Emlyn Evans Jr was so impressed by the beauty and strangeness of the writing, he arranged for selections to be printed in a limited edition, under the title A Localised Study of Dry Precipitation. The book has become a cult read among poets. Evans Sr moved to the US from Wales in his 20s and lived alone after the death of his wife in the early 1980s. His sons knew he had obsessive interests (he made tapestries depicting weather phenomena and owned 1800 books on fungi) but knew nothing of his fascination for dust.