Collection: Martina Evans

Martina Evans (b. 1961) grew up in Co. Cork. She trained as a radiographer at St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin, and moved to London in 1988. Her first collection of poems, The Inniscarra Bar and Cycle Rest appeared in 1995. In 2011 she was awarded the Ciampi International Poetry Prize. Thomas McCarthy on Martina Evans: "Martina Evan’s poetry collections are a unique Irish aviary, a poet’s birdlife that sings above the obvious political drama. Her imagination is unique, darting, flitting, resonating with personal and poetic voices. Alone among her generation, she has tried to recover a lost psychological atmosphere; she has tried to restore Ireland as a remembered Arcady of mothers and daughters, of aunts and alcoholics. She is at once emotional nd shrewd: her modern outlook is well camouflaged from the conservative and provincial vigilantes who roam the Irish poetic territory. Hidden behind the rich lace-curtain of her personal charm, her existentialism sings."