American Mules

Martina Evans

• Éditeur: Carcanet Poetry
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800170902
• Sujet: Literatur
• Sous-sujet: Poesie

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.

Table des matières

• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Hackney Trident
• So
• Regency Pumps, Clonakilty, 1970
• Guards
• Lost Buckle, Tramore Amusement Park, 1970
• Horses in the Basement
• Western Heroes
• Radiographers are the Coldest of All
• Skulls
• Babies
• Nighttown
• The Madwife Brings a Flower in her Bag
• Pethidine
• Clinical Indications
• Vile Jelly
• Throne
• Man Falls Off A Greenhouse 1
• Last Look at the Generator, St Vincents’ School of Radiography, 1982
• Man Falls Off A Greenhouse 2
• Barium Swallow
• The Ambulance Driver Said She Didn’t Like My Crocs
• Snake in my Shoe
• American Mules
• X-Raying Feet
• Fourteenth Hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice
• Watch
• The Clerk at the Family Court
• My Persephone
• Everything in this Room is a Future Ruin
• Mrs Schiff’s Washing Machine
• January
• Secrets aren’t always Surprises
• Through the Glass
• Oysters
• The Irish Airman Parachutes to Earth
• Unicorns
• Wuthering Heights
• London
• Trigeminal Neuralgia
• The Cats of Balls Pond Road
• As Stupid as a Tenor
• The Switch
• Reading Seán Ó Faoláin to the English in the Year 2001
• Seventy Seven
• Returned Yanks
• Fine Gael form a Coalition Government with Labour, March 1973
• Mountainy Men
• They’ve No Time for Trees Today
• About the Author
• Copyright