Martina Evans's AMERICAN MULES

 I'm a fan of Martina Evans, and this latest collection gives many different pleasures. The shorter lyrics offer a wealth of local and personal detail that seduce a reader with the childhood world of Cork and the adult one of London. Even when she is writing about her job in radiography, she is not so much writing about the work as the people: their fears, their waywardness, their idiosyncracies. The poetic sequences, whether they are about shoes or cats, offer the delights of variations on a theme. The long narrative "Mountainy Men" is yet another triumph of narrative skill. It reminds me of Flannery O'Connor, not her religious intensity, but her deep ambivalence towards Gothic grotesquerie. Evans is enraptured not by transcendence, but by the here and now, the there and then. 

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