Martina Evans

Jan 12, 2025 | irishtimes.com | Martina Evans

Fairy-tale tropes prove to be valuable tools for examining the bruised family in Alvy Carragher’s What Remains the Same(Gallery €12.99). “Flip a coin,” exhorts the title poem. “Let’s say six or seven brothers,/ give them any old feathers, eyes that glint.// Count the years since their mother passed ... What remains is a sister, alone,/ trying to break her brothers’ curse,//stitching garments from thick nettles”.

Dec 9, 2024 | fivebooks.com | Martina Evans |Fran Lock |Patrick McGuinness |Samantha Dickey

Thanks for speaking to us about the inaugural Heaney Prize shortlist. Can you talk us through what the prize seeks to recognise? The inaugural PEN Heaney Prize, which is generously supported by the Hawthornden Foundation and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, recognises a single volume of poetry by one author, published in the UK or Ireland, a book of outstanding literary merit that engages with the impact of cultural or political events on human conditions or relationships.

Oct 20, 2024 | irishtimes.com | Martina Evans

“a blackbird knaps/ the flint of my heart,/sparks fly” – Geraldine Mitchell opens Naming Love(Arlen House, €15) with a haiku – a succinct herald to her theme of frozen grief alleviated and uplifted by nature, “ ... stark news I was in no way prepared for.//With what force then the foam of hawthorn/ smothered fields and hills in its white blooming ... shouted ... rinse your skulls,/ be drunk on whin, on the sour smell of past, dog daisy ...” (Leaving the Festival).

Aug 2, 2024 | irishtimes.com | Martina Evans

ISBN-13: 978-1805220701Publisher: Profile Books“It’s chastening to realise the degree of unquestioned licence that possession of a garden gives. Over this finite patch of a finite planet you can do just about whatever you like …” The Accidental Garden tells how Richard Mabey and his partner Polly made room on two Norfolk acres “for both the weeds and the wilderness and the defining human habit of pottering”. Gardens are unlike other human spaces.

Jul 28, 2024 | irishtimes.com | Martina Evans

Will Burns’s debut collection Country Music showcased an original Home Counties kind of “High Lonesome” with more than a dash of Robert Lowell. Ancient Burial Ground (Corsair£10.99)builds on his light and lugubrious touch, poems mirroring themselves effortlessly as they evoke the quotidian, “Bastardised breakfast of eggs/and whatever else we had to hand,/then the present heavy-pressed and failing/us as we walk out on to the beach.” (Five Mile Road, Atlantic Coast).