Poets have often likened the constraints of the sonnet to a prison, but Martina Evans writes sonnets knowing that this doesn’t go both ways: prisoners don’t go around saying their cells are like little songs.
For those souls “who have felt the weight of too much liberty”, Wordsworth may recommend a recreational spell of solitary confinement in the sonnet form, for “the prison, into which we doom/ Ourselves, no prison is”. Terence Hayes flips the trope when he writes, “I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,/ Part panic closet”.
Drawing on her own experience, Evans’s astonishing new collection Drunken Driving is a sonnet sequence set primarily in the radiography lab of Pentonville Prison in London in the mid-1990s. It is fuelled by a careening, rule-agnostic narrative drive that befits its menacing title. Among the most extraordinary things about the book is that – aptly for an X-ray technician – it can see right through entire systems of poetic prestige and penal judgment.
Drunken Driving continues a story that Evans has been simultaneously honing and extending for nearly three decades, commencing publication in the very years in which this latest of the series is set. In 1998, Evans published her novel The Glass Mountain, about an unwanted pregnancy in 1980s Cork, which she then compressed into the prose-poem sequence Through the Glass Mountain (2013) and the sonnets of The Coming Thing (2023).
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Her new book brings back the characters from her earlier long poems Petrol (2012) and The Coming Thing, which together track her authorial stand-in, Imelda, from youth with a bullying father through adolescence among punks in Cork to, now, her precarious early career in London. It’s as if the story required a long, careful development in the dark room of her practice.
Drunken Driving picks up with Imelda as a 33-year-old radiologist, mother, and hesitant learner driver who’s already “done ten years ... trapped” in her marriage sentence. In Pentonville, “Nearly everyone/ was Irish, West Indian, or Nigerian. Conclusions should be drawn.” She points out that “half the X-rays were for assault, usually by the police.” She hides her accent, going “undercover” but readying herself to “WRITE IT DOWN!”
These aren’t Shakespearean sonnets, but she’s attended to him too: “I never laughed at people’s names, only once when/ I X-rayed William Shakespeare in the Mater, Dublin.” Every long-lined, unrhymed sonnet wears a shackle of epigraphs, a quotation from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897, two years after the first medical X-ray) above and a block-capital extract from driving manuals or prison regulations beneath.
Locking one fin de siècle to another, she practically dares the Count to frighten us half as much as modern drunks behind the wheel. Imelda is interested in Pentonville’s storied history but no one around her cares about Roger Casement and Oscar Wilde being tortured in this place where “Half of Madame Tussaud’s waxworks were/ hanged.”
Evans uses this startlingly original collage form to question the abuses of reform and formality. “We’re sticklers for procedure in the prison service!” crows her boss, a vampire like all the rest.
While The Coming Thing began with Imelda caught by the patriarchal gaze of small-town Ireland (“seen passing a joint on Patrick’s Bridge/ when I thought I was pure invisible. Escaped”), here the actual prison is so under-resourced that “they didn’t even have a proper Panopticon.” In the very birthplace of Bentham’s architecture of surveillance, much of Imelda’s battle is, ironically, to be seen: a struggle for safety oversight and union representation.
Evans vividly evokes the fetid atmosphere of the dark-room, diaphanous with asbestos. Irradiated by male condescension and other noxious particles, Imelda speaks of “holding/ my breath as I pressed the exposure button” to capture penetrating portraits of inmates.
This is a story about exposure at many levels beyond the radiographic: to workplace toxicity, to carceral viciousness, to “all the marvellous tints that come on foul clouds,” to the dangers of traffic, to men who prey upon women’s empathy and emotional labour (“my tears a blood transfusion for him”).
Drunken Driving is, finally, an acutely personal story that continues Martina Evans’s lit-match look at the combustible fluid in the heart. It can be read on its own for its many pleasures and shocks or as part of her ongoing inquiry into the ways we survive in a world of vampiric thirst and intoxicated protocol. Evans checks her mirrors, knowing that these things behind her are closer than they appear.
Greg Londe lectures in English at Cornell University, New York
