Search results for ""Author Martina Evans""

Martina Evans's fifth collection moves from the impact of American culture and rock'n'roll in the 1960s on her home town, a small Catholic community in rural Ireland, to life in contemporary London. Her poems spring from memories, anecdotes of local characters, children's books, shoes and cats; finally they revisit her Burnfort schooldays in sharp, truthful and often funny poems. Her poems will appeal to all who enjoy her unique blend of poetry and storytelling, her astute mimicry of conversational styles and her gift for offbeat humour.

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'Petrol' is a prose poem disguised as a novella of adolescence in Co. Cork, Ireland. It is a unique work and a remarkable departure for a writer whose poetry is widely appreciated for its humour and uncompromising depiction of rural Ireland.

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A TLS and The Irish Times Book of the Year. The Coming Thing is a brilliant long narrative poem. It is not Evans's first: she has become celebrated for work on this scale, spoken, dramatic, abundant. She has been justly acclaimed by, among others, Colm Toibin. He says of her inimitable narrative style, 'Slowly, a poem that seems animated by random thoughts and images takes on a strange, concentrated power; the lines begin to feel like pure style, the narrative voice holding and wielding the hidden energies that Martina Evans consolidates, and then releases with such energy and confidence and verve.' Imelda, the book's central character, is immersed in challenging new worlds where old customs still somehow survive. It is the 1980s and the poem takes shape among punks in Cork City. The 'coming thing' refers to the arrival of computers which were taking hold and beginning to effect their transformations of data and then of lives; but ultimately the title identifies the abortion which Imelda will have in a Brixton clinic. Imelda, who Evans's regular readers will recall from her earlier narrative Petrol (2012), narrates the story with a light touch, even when the book's preoccupation with abortion, suicide and euthanasia provides a strong and compelling undertow. The Coming Thing looks hard at the duplicity surrounding received ideas about the sacredness of human life and how economic change runs counter to the values of 'old' Ireland.

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The Windows of Graceland gathers the cream of the crop from Martina Evans's five previous collections of poetry, brought up to date by a selection of new and unpublished work. The earliest poems date back to 1998 and Evans's expatriation from Ireland. A complex nostalgia for her Catholic childhood establishes a central and enduring thread in the writing, the bloody shadow of sectarian conflict commingling with a child's pastoral of pleated mustard kilts and corduroy paisley dresses, the 'sighing country roads', the 'blue Burnfort evening'. The later poems, written from London, develop a fascination with Americana as the poet's own cultural displacement takes on substitute forms, the Irish traveller Elvis O'Donnell finding his unlikely double in that other Elvis, of Graceland. Early poems on childhood come full-circle across the selection's twenty-five year span in more recent poems on motherhood. When the poet's teenage daughter returns home missing a shoe, 'I don't share her grief. / I feel relief / as if the shoe is a coin / paid to the wild / for her safe return.' From story-teller to free-verse fili, memoirist to satirist, daughter to mother, The Windows of Graceland distils Evans's full poetic range and power.

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Martina Evans' third collection of poems begins and ends in the dentist's chair. In between come stories ranging from an Irish childhood to present-day London, featuring voices from the poet's own to those of her family, her cat, and a supporting cast of hectoring lawyers, born bores and rambling mothers. Evans combines a novelist's gift for creating compelling narratives and capturing conversational idiosyncracies with a poet's ability to condense and refine, making "Can Dentists Be Trusted?" a book that will delight the many who enjoyed its acclaimed predecessor "All Alcoholics Are Charmers" (1998).

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Winner of the Pigott Poetry Prize 2022. A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021. A Sunday Independent (Ireland) Book of the Year 2021. Martina Evans's eponymous Mules are shoes brought to her as an exotic gift by an American relation. They suggest to her the possibility of a very different world, one which the poems' speakers set out to explore. As happens often in her poems, new and invented experiences throw into relief Evans's own intensely lived experiences: the radiography units of hospitals and their merciless work culture, in which the speakers must survive; a London densely populated by human and animal characters whose colours and aspect she brilliantly evokes. And we revisit places her readers have encountered before, especially Burnfort, County Cork, with its bars and gossip and childhood complications, a subject of her lyrics. And, in the wake of the success of her 2018 book-length sequence, Now We Can Talk Openly About Men, she gives us a new long poem, 'Mountainy Men', which re-imagines family trauma through the prism of classic American cinema... American Mules is two books and two or more worlds in one. Evans's English makes different musics in the imagining of Ireland, England and America, but the same wise, wry, inventive mouth speaks them all.

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Shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Shortlisted for the 2019 Pigott Poetry Award. Shortlisted for the 2019 Roehampton Poetry Prize. Featured in the TLS & Irish Times Books of the Year 2018. Martina Evans's Now We Can Talk Openly about Men is a pair of dramatic monologues, snapshots of the lives of two women in 1920s Ireland. The first, Kitty Donovan, is a dressmaker in the time of the Irish War of Independence. The second, Babe Cronin, is set in 1924, shortly after the Irish Civil War. Kitty is a dressmaker with a taste for laudanum. Babe is a stenographer who has fallen in love with a young revolutionary. Through their separate, overlapping stories, Evans colours an era and a culture seldom voiced in verse. Set back some years from their stories, both women find a strand of humour in what took place, even as they recall the passion, vertigo and terror of those times. A dream-like compulsion in their voices adds a sense of retrospective inevitability. The use of intense, almost psychedelic colour in the first half of the book opposes the flattened, monochrome language of the second half. This is a work of vivid contrasts, of age and youth, women and men, the Irish and the English: complementary stories of balance, imbalance, and transition.

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