The Windows of Graceland gathers the cream of the crop from Martina Evans's five previous collections of poetry, brought up to date by a selection of new and unpublished work. The earliest poems date back to 1998 and Evans's expatriation from Ireland. A complex nostalgia for her Catholic childhood establishes a central and enduring thread in the writing, the bloody shadow of sectarian conflict commingling with a child's pastoral of pleated mustard kilts and corduroy paisley dresses, the 'sighing country roads', the 'blue Burnfort evening'. The later poems, written from London, develop a fascination with Americana as the poet's own cultural displacement takes on substitute forms, the Irish traveller Elvis O'Donnell finding his unlikely double in that other Elvis, of Graceland. Early poems on childhood come full-circle across the selection's twenty-five year span in more recent poems on motherhood. When the poet's teenage daughter returns home missing a shoe, 'I don't share her grief. / I feel relief / as if the shoe is a coin / paid to the wild / for her safe return.' From story-teller to free-verse fili, memoirist to satirist, daughter to mother, The Windows of Graceland distils Evans's full poetic range and power.

*Martina Evans won the Betty Trask Award and the Premio Ciampi International Prize for Poetry*Windows of Graceland draws on Martina's first five collections and adds new work*Poems explore the shadows of Irish history: the Easter Rising, the 'Black and Tans', etc

About the Author
Martina Evans was born in 1961, the youngest of ten children, and grew up in County Cork. After training as a radiographer in Dublin she moved to London in 1988. Her first collection of poems, The Inniscarra Bar and Cycle Rest, appeared in 1995 and was followed by three further collections, All Alcoholics are Charmers (1998), Can Dentists Be Trusted? (2004) and Facing the Public (2009). She teaches Creative Writing at the City Literary Institute and Birkbeck College. She is also the author of three novels: Midnight Feast (1996), The Glass Mountain (1997), No Drinking No Dancing No Doctors (2000) and the prose-poem/novella Petrol (2012). She lives in London with her daughter.

Reviews
'Evans's great skill is in knowing how much to put into a poem. She has a talent for selecting only the most resonant memories, for not over-icing the cake of sentiment. [...] Above all, Evans puts the right words in the right order, a dictum whose simple phrasing embodies its demands.' Michael Duggan, PN Review; 'These look like easy, anecdotal poems but they bite.' Alan Brownjohn, Sunday Times; 'A deceptively casual and enjoyable collection.' Irish Times; 'Martina Evans [is] brazenly humorous [...] with her dizzyingly wacky free-verse tale telling.' The Tablet



Book Information
ISBN 9781784102760
Author Martina Evans
Format Paperback
Page Count 120
Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd