American Mules: poetry at once serious and authentically enjoyable

American Mules

Author: Martina Evans

ISBN-13: 978-1800170896

Publisher: Carcanet

Guideline Price: £12.99

The opening poem of American Mules, the eighth collection from Martina Evans, finds the poet going through a plethora of electricians to get the fusebox in her Hackney home repaired:

Mick from UK Power Direct took it away in the end.
He said the Trident could be very classy but he didn't
say my rusty, paint-splashed one was
although I still have a piece of its porcelain.

His parents were from Mayo and Kerry but he didn't say that
until we were alone.

It is a perfect beginning, and one which captures everything good that Evans is about: the bric-a-brac of life as we live it, people and their speech, power and hardship, the gently furtive shame of exile. The man from UK Power says his parents were from home, but not until nobody else is around.

Some of the best Irish poets now writing form a sort of unofficial Cork diaspora: the wild Delanty in Vermont, the sage O’Donoghue in Oxford, the peerless Maurice Riordan of Willesden Junction; Martina Evans is of their company, and hers is among the more singular voices.

Her work is humane and funny, often beautiful, always without sentiment or bitterness, and owing as much to the studied artlessness of the New York School as it does to any homegrown models. “I want to be like Frank O’Hara”, one celebrated earlier poem says.

American Mules is billed as two books in one and provides refreshing relief from the pressurised minitiaturist precision of much contemporary poetry. 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.

The title poem recalls glamorous, ill-fitting shoes brought back from the United States. Elsewhere a watch is put alone into a washing machine on the night before a wedding; horsehair in a basement’s walls recalls hunts from the speaker’s childhood, and an X-ray referral comes with the one-word note: “Irish”.

One of the best lyrics in American Mules is simply titled London. It encapsulates sweetly the duality of long exile, where the ache of home is tempered by the sheer relief of getting back away.

Feverishly, I return, always running
From Ireland and built-up
yellow brick calms me
like green fields for others.

Evans’s poems are never simply spoken by a poet, but also by a woman who trained as a radiographer and whose training informs so much of her work. Here is the marrow of life to which most poetry, however much we kid ourselves, simply does not have access, and it is delivered invariably with delicacy and clarity:

The pathologist brought her in a white
Bucket and I spread out the tissue paper.
I had my reasons to lay out the small
Perfectly-formed rubbery doll-like
Arms and legs on the X-ray table…

The final third of this already generous book is taken up with Mountainy Men, a long poem in the form of dramatic monologue narrated in 2008 by Johnny O’Hare, the owner of a video shop in Evans’s native Co Cork. As such, Mountainy Men represents something of a return to the territory and style mined in her previous collection, the acclaimed Now We Can Talk Openly About Men, and is a remarkable feat of ventriloquism in its own right:

When the Ould Fella agreed to curtains
I reported him to Mrs Savage.
As Mitchum said – Crossfire (1947) -
the snakes were loose.

Mountainy Men recounts the 70s childhood of the narrator and his sister Greta, their bed-bound “Old Lady”, and the help called Attracta who their “Ould Fella” hires. The narration is funny and irreverent and yet full of pathos. It showcases Evans’s flair for striking imagery mined from the least poetic of sources:

…his combover blew up and stood at right angles
To his head like a galvanised sheet quivering
In the wind…

The poem is also laced with quotes from the potboiler life of Marie-Antoinette, which the narrator reads nightly to his mother, or from the countless movies watched nightly on their Epsom Megaplex projector, which the siblings in turn parrot in response to any given circumstance:

They said myself and Ould Fella were
a pair of mules, one as bad as the other.
So was the end of their cinematic education.
They tried to trawl back but I told them to skip it.
Save it for some other mug, I said.

Evans is that rarest of rara avis, a poet whose work is at once serious and authentically enjoyable. As Bernard O’Donoghue has said, her poems are collectively “a miracle, for the way they combine total clarity with profundity”. Evans is working now with more brio and fearlessness than ever before. American Mules is a book of splendours and will surely count among her very best.

Conor O’Callaghan’s latest novel is We Are Not in the World