Shortlisted for 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.
