All Alcoholics are Charmers

Evans Martina

Martina Evans's new collection mines the rich seam running between rural Ireland and urban England, between personal and folk memory, and between fiction and reality. These are poems that simultaneously engage with the real world, while keeping a line open to myth and history. They are peopled with nurses, minicab drivers and priests, set-dancers, drinkers and lovers, Mayo labourers, children and Indian cornershop-owners. From County Cork to London's Holloway Road, "All Alcoholics are Charmers" is a second collection that buzzes and sings with life.

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

Winner, 2011 Premio Ciampi Internazionale di Poesia (Ciampi International Poetry Prize) (Facing the Public)

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