Burnfort, Las Vegas

"She is at once emotional and shrewd: hidden behind the rich lace-curtain of her personal charm, her existentialism sings."—Thomas McCarthy

 

"Martina Evans’s poems are a miracle, for the way they combine total clarity with profundity: the way the apparently innocent and observant humour of their narrative surface covers a compassion and understanding that are often heartbreaking and heartbroken."— Bernard O’Donoghue

 

Following her prose poem-cum-novella Petrol (2013), Martina Evans returns to her childhood and adolescence in County Cork, Ireland, with poems and prose poems which begin with the impact of American culture and particularly rock ’n’ roll on the small town where she grew up.

 

We move the Sacred Heart lamp

closer to Elvis’s face now in the month

of June. I think that those

billboards of Vegas

could be the Major cigarette sign

or the Double Diamond Works Wonders

in the lounge window round ’75

or the BP pump shining

in the blue Burnfort evening . . .

 

We encounter ghosts, travelers, shoes, old movies, alcoholics, and even Bart Simpson in Evans’s poems as we move from her school and college days, with their eccentric cast of teachers, to contemporary London and the sights, sounds, and characters of Balls Pond Road, where she lives with her daughter and three cats. The book ends with a series of poems about youthful reading—from clandestine reading in class to the joy and escape of childhood reading—"the miracle / of the black marks straightening themselves / out into sense across the page."