Facing the Public
Martina Evans
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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Desperate Men
Christmas Day and Good Friday
were the only days that the pub closed.
And yet they came –
trembling strangers, under hats and caps,
lapels turned up against the slanting wind
or hiding a dog collar.
They were desperate.
We knew men like them for 363 days of the year
apologetic, obsequious and persistent,
dark ravens
tap tap tapping at our front door.
Isn’t it a fright? everyone whispered
over the Brussels sprouts, the one day in the year.
Wouldn’t you think they would stock up or their wives could ...?
I pondered but sshhh in the name of God my mother
looked at me as if I was planning my future.
You’ll draw them in on top of us,
she passed out slices of turkey on tip-toe
and we avoided the noise of cutlery on china
chewing tensely until we heard the sound
of footsteps on gravel again
the wind-up growl of an old Escort or Cortina starting up,
driving away.
The opening poems of the Cork-born writer’s fourth collection draw on stories from her Irish childhood, tales of the impact of the Black and Tans on her family’s locality in the 1920s. The heady brew of Irish politics and religion is close to the surface throughout. The title poem captures conversational drama in her most engaging style, familiar to audiences at her highly successful readings:
My mother never asked like a normal person, it was
I’m asking you for the last time, I’m imploring you
not to go up that road again late for Mass …
This book will be available again soon
Irish Times Praise for Martina Evans 'Terrifying tales of peace'
Kate Clanchy, The Guardian
Rosie Lavan, Poetry Ireland Review
'A sharply idiomatic reflection of the Irish revolution and Civil War... it is unputdownable'.
Roy Foster, TLS Books of the Year 2018
'Totally captivating.'
Susan Jane Sims, Artemis Poetry
'...a rich poetic contribution to our forthcoming interrogation of the War of independence, two intense and riveting dramatic monologues by women affected by the burning of Mallow in 1920, and the malaise of the new state in 1924.'
Catriona Crowe, The Irish Times Best Books of 2018
'Evans manages in this collection, like a great filmmaker or novelist, to gift the audience (and I use the word "audience" deliberately) with immersion into a world so real and complete we have to reluctantly drag ourselves back to our fictional lives.'
Anne Tannam, The Dublin Review of Books
'Full of insight and humour...Evan's ability to choose just the right word is unerring.'
Suzanne O'Sullivan, The Observer
'I loved everything about this book'
Kate Kellaway, The Observer
'Evans's ear for speech suits the monologue, and the monologues - talky, jumpy, Gothic - are intensely atmospheric, claustrophobic pieces... Here, and throughout, Evans catches the nightmarish powerlessness of living close to historical changes.'
John McAuliffe, The Irish Times
'Her ability to replicate on the page colloquial Irish rhythms and phrasing has been commented on before, and it draws the reader in from the beginning... Each poem is, in a sense, akin to a chapter of a novel, and there is narrative drive both within the poems and between them, but as they are poems, i.e. stand-alone entities and in this sense equally analogous to paintings, they serve as much as windows onto moments, thoughts, memories and feelings as narrative blocks.'
Chris Edgoose, Wood Bee Poet
'Evans' verse is tightly packed with images, but loose enough in its metre to read naturally. One can take the book at a running pace and enjoy a story with deep emotional beats, or slow the pace and reflect on the careful choice of wording.'
Joe Darlington, Manchester Review of Books
The admired vernacular brilliance of Martina Evans's poetry is applied here to her most ambitious work to date, bringing to vivid life one of the most terrible periods of Irish history from the Troubles around 1920 to the Civil War, as witnessed and experienced by two generations of women ... No other poet currently writing in Britain and Ireland can rival Evans's ability to represent the impact of the political on the personal without easy histrionics. This is a remarkable document, a major work.
Bernard O'Donoghue 'a subtle, challenging writer with a wonderfully destructive approach to the pieties she describes.'
John McAuliffe, Irish Times 'Evan's great skill is in knowing how much to put into a poem. She has a talent for selecting only the most resonant memories, for not over-icing the cake of sentiment. [...] Above all, Evans puts the right words in the right order, a dictum whose simple phrasing embodies its demands.'
Michael Duggan, PN Review 'These look like easy, anecdotal poems but they bite.'
Alan Brownjohn, Sunday Times 'Martina Evans [is] brazenly humorous [...] with her dizzyingly wacky free-verse tale-telling.'
The Tablet
