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American Mules
Martina Evans
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Categories: 21st Century, Irish, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Digital access available through Exact Editions
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (160 pages)
(Pub. Apr 2021)
9781800170896
£12.99 £11.69
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Apr 2021)
9781800170902
£10.39 £9.35
To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
- Description
- Author
- Awards
- Reviews
Winner of the Pigott Poetry Prize 2022
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021
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.
Awards won by Martina Evans
Short-listed, 2024 The PEN Heaney Prize (The Coming Thing)
Short-listed, 2024 The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry (The Coming Thing)
Winner, 2022 The Pigott Poetry Prize
(American Mules) Short-listed, 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award (Now We Can Talk Openly About Men) Short-listed, 2019 The Pigott Poetry Award (Now We Can Talk Openly About Men) Short-listed, 2019 The Roehampton Poetry Prize (Now We Can Talk Openly About Men) Short-listed, 2015 Irish Times Poetry Now Award (Burnfort, Las Vegas) Winner, 2011 Premio Ciampi Internazionale di Poesia (Ciampi International Poetry Prize) (Facing the Public)
(American Mules) Short-listed, 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award (Now We Can Talk Openly About Men) Short-listed, 2019 The Pigott Poetry Award (Now We Can Talk Openly About Men) Short-listed, 2019 The Roehampton Poetry Prize (Now We Can Talk Openly About Men) Short-listed, 2015 Irish Times Poetry Now Award (Burnfort, Las Vegas) Winner, 2011 Premio Ciampi Internazionale di Poesia (Ciampi International Poetry Prize) (Facing the Public)
'Technical mastery of loose sonnet form and chatty iambic pentameters... transforming the materiality of life into poems that are both funny and profound.'
Clíona ní Ríordáin, Times Literary Supplement
'Evans will not give in to easy effects or even a singing line. It is all crosstalk, undertone, interruption, pure hilarity, like someone telling a story, like someone thinking. And somehow out of what feels like raw life comes a register that is often luminous [...] At page 100 we have been engaged by a rich sensibility, and a poet with an astonishing technical confidence who knows how to turn a poem or leave a reader unsure where the emotion is coming from. Feeling, in these poems, is subtly placed and managed. It is hard to see what more Evans can do with the fifty pages. The answer is a long poem called 'Mountainy Men', a bravura piece, filled with incident, tension, verbal excitement [...] 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.'
Colm Tóibín, Poetry Ireland Review
'Martina Evans keeps the reader in close and constant orbit... It gave me immense pleasure'
Megan Fernandes, Poetry Foundation
'Martina Evans' poems are compressed stories, if not entire novels, in all but their word counts. The specimens, none of them overlong, in American Mules jaunt along delightfully, as if spoken into your ear, and they show a particular interest in the details of the everyday - she is the least abstract, least generalising of poets. There is no poetical windbaggery here, more a pleasing companionableness, a grabbing-you-by-the-under-arm and racing you along beside'
Michael Glover, The Tablet
'Martina Evans's American Mules, a scintillating poetry collection from a unique, deeply observant, beautifully compassionate consciousness which creates a fully realised world of its own.'
Catriona Crowe, The Irish Times
'American Mules by Martina Evans is a glorious collection of poems, two books within one, an astonishment of riches. How she melds narrative audacity with sharp insight and juicy lyricism is so memorable. It's a book that gets into your heart. These poems echo and shimmer'
Joseph O'Connor, The Irish Times
'Striking powers of social observation... every single adjective attentively exact... Without straining for effect, she mixes pity with horror - and a repeated theme of fallibility'
Fiona Sampson, The Guardian
'Her work is humane and funny, often beautiful, always without sentiment or bitterness... It is loose, chatty and free, awash with hospitals, cats and shoes. For Evans the joy of the given moment, the past's ever-present grief, the dreams of films and books, are frequencies overlapping at once... Evans is that rarest of rara avis, a poet whose work is at once serious and authentically enjoyable... American Mules is a book of splendours and will surely count among her very best.'
Conor O'Callaghan, The Irish Times
Praise for Martina Evans 'Freed from fiction's narratorial interventions and expectations of plot resolution, The Coming Thing blends the distillation of poetry and the looseness of prose into a restless, beating text that captures the context of a city and a people fizzing to escape.'
Clíona Ní Ríordáin, The Stinging Fly
'This punk sense, of freedom being won and explored, is one of the forces that pushes forward the latest long narrative poem by Martina Evans... The action moves quickly - and at points the book does grip like a thriller... All this is sharply observed, without the pieties of a simple morality tale. What's left is a sense of the panic of something lost, but something gained'
Rishi Dastidar, Magma
'A mind-spinning narrative poem that brings us through a young woman's life in 1980s Ireland.'
Catriona Crowe, The Irish Times
'Harshness irradiates Martina Evans's riveting narrative poem The Coming Thing... There are echoes of Shane MacGowan and early Edna O'Brien, but no one else is writing like this.'
Roy Foster, Times Literary Supplement
'It's not often you pick up a book and feel within five pages that this is what you've been waiting to read your whole life... What the Pogues did to folk music when they took it by the scruff of the neck, Evans does to the sonnet (literally "little song"), creating furious narrative bursts with the energy of three-minute punk songs... I'll be giving this book to all my friends.'
Philip Terry, The Guardian
'Evans drops her depth charges intermittently, unexpectedly and with great power and control. Her technical excellence combines with a clear-eyed and capacious artistry so that no poem is only itself and every poem is changed by those around it... There are marvels in The Coming Thing that all talented storytellers will love: the sheer joy of spoken language, the honesty of the writing, the fragile exuberance of youth, which somehow survives its dooms long enough to recount them. Martina Evan's book will be valued by all who appreciate contemporary Irish poetry and will, this reader hopes, lead to the even wider audience that her brilliant and exceptional work has long deserved.'
Joseph O'Connor, The Irish Times
'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...Evans' 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 'Evans' 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 'A deceptively casual and enjoyable collection.'
Irish Times 'Martina Evans [is] brazenly humorous [...] with her dizzyingly wacky free-verse tale-telling.'
The Tablet
Clíona ní Ríordáin, Times Literary Supplement
'Evans will not give in to easy effects or even a singing line. It is all crosstalk, undertone, interruption, pure hilarity, like someone telling a story, like someone thinking. And somehow out of what feels like raw life comes a register that is often luminous [...] At page 100 we have been engaged by a rich sensibility, and a poet with an astonishing technical confidence who knows how to turn a poem or leave a reader unsure where the emotion is coming from. Feeling, in these poems, is subtly placed and managed. It is hard to see what more Evans can do with the fifty pages. The answer is a long poem called 'Mountainy Men', a bravura piece, filled with incident, tension, verbal excitement [...] 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.'
Colm Tóibín, Poetry Ireland Review
'Martina Evans keeps the reader in close and constant orbit... It gave me immense pleasure'
Megan Fernandes, Poetry Foundation
'Martina Evans' poems are compressed stories, if not entire novels, in all but their word counts. The specimens, none of them overlong, in American Mules jaunt along delightfully, as if spoken into your ear, and they show a particular interest in the details of the everyday - she is the least abstract, least generalising of poets. There is no poetical windbaggery here, more a pleasing companionableness, a grabbing-you-by-the-under-arm and racing you along beside'
Michael Glover, The Tablet
'Martina Evans's American Mules, a scintillating poetry collection from a unique, deeply observant, beautifully compassionate consciousness which creates a fully realised world of its own.'
Catriona Crowe, The Irish Times
'American Mules by Martina Evans is a glorious collection of poems, two books within one, an astonishment of riches. How she melds narrative audacity with sharp insight and juicy lyricism is so memorable. It's a book that gets into your heart. These poems echo and shimmer'
Joseph O'Connor, The Irish Times
'Striking powers of social observation... every single adjective attentively exact... Without straining for effect, she mixes pity with horror - and a repeated theme of fallibility'
Fiona Sampson, The Guardian
'Her work is humane and funny, often beautiful, always without sentiment or bitterness... It is loose, chatty and free, awash with hospitals, cats and shoes. For Evans the joy of the given moment, the past's ever-present grief, the dreams of films and books, are frequencies overlapping at once... Evans is that rarest of rara avis, a poet whose work is at once serious and authentically enjoyable... American Mules is a book of splendours and will surely count among her very best.'
Conor O'Callaghan, The Irish Times
Praise for Martina Evans 'Freed from fiction's narratorial interventions and expectations of plot resolution, The Coming Thing blends the distillation of poetry and the looseness of prose into a restless, beating text that captures the context of a city and a people fizzing to escape.'
Clíona Ní Ríordáin, The Stinging Fly
'This punk sense, of freedom being won and explored, is one of the forces that pushes forward the latest long narrative poem by Martina Evans... The action moves quickly - and at points the book does grip like a thriller... All this is sharply observed, without the pieties of a simple morality tale. What's left is a sense of the panic of something lost, but something gained'
Rishi Dastidar, Magma
'A mind-spinning narrative poem that brings us through a young woman's life in 1980s Ireland.'
Catriona Crowe, The Irish Times
'Harshness irradiates Martina Evans's riveting narrative poem The Coming Thing... There are echoes of Shane MacGowan and early Edna O'Brien, but no one else is writing like this.'
Roy Foster, Times Literary Supplement
'It's not often you pick up a book and feel within five pages that this is what you've been waiting to read your whole life... What the Pogues did to folk music when they took it by the scruff of the neck, Evans does to the sonnet (literally "little song"), creating furious narrative bursts with the energy of three-minute punk songs... I'll be giving this book to all my friends.'
Philip Terry, The Guardian
'Evans drops her depth charges intermittently, unexpectedly and with great power and control. Her technical excellence combines with a clear-eyed and capacious artistry so that no poem is only itself and every poem is changed by those around it... There are marvels in The Coming Thing that all talented storytellers will love: the sheer joy of spoken language, the honesty of the writing, the fragile exuberance of youth, which somehow survives its dooms long enough to recount them. Martina Evan's book will be valued by all who appreciate contemporary Irish poetry and will, this reader hopes, lead to the even wider audience that her brilliant and exceptional work has long deserved.'
Joseph O'Connor, The Irish Times
'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...Evans' 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 'Evans' 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 'A deceptively casual and enjoyable collection.'
Irish Times 'Martina Evans [is] brazenly humorous [...] with her dizzyingly wacky free-verse tale-telling.'
The Tablet
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