Interview – Dennis Morton’s Poetry Show in Santa Cruz
PETROL – WELSH ARTS REVIEW
Through The Glass Mountain
Bloom Books June 2013
Using the unique form of her dramatic poem, Petrol, Martina Evans compresses her original novel The Glass Mountain into a new book of cinematic prose poetry.
LISTEN to an excerpt on youtube
‘A spiritual pen-portrait which touches immaculately on exactly what it is like to be 18′ -
The Independent on Sunday
‘Haunting and Sympathetic.’ Bernard O’Donoghue
Martina talks to Julia Bell about Through The Glass Mountain – listen to the podcast on Writers’ Hub
To ‘Search Inside’ Through The Glass Mountain
and buy on Amazon click here
’Petrol is a masterpiece: deeply original and inspired.’ Bernard O’Donoghue
Click here to watch PETROL on youtube
Download Petrol the audiobook from Spoken Ink
‘Evans offers the child’s-eye view at its most dislocated, in language at once visceral and poised, drenched in sensory associations. Food, fabric, scent, hair – all appear in sharp relief; petrol itself wafts from the pages. Beneath these adeptly captured details , however, swims the inchoate lake of adolescent emotion which is Evans’s real subject: Petrol deals in unacceptable desires, semi-disgusting longings, yearning, lust and loss. It is a marvelous poem of youth, insightfully evoking a vanished Ireland and bringing the past to palpitating life…mediumistic, skilful and bittersweet.’ – Poetry Review
‘Such genuine, witty writing is a rarity.’ Rachel Cusk
‘She shows an impressive command of what feels like the ideal narrative medium: individual moments and drive of narrative in perfect coordination, language alive and kicking.’ – Christopher Reid
Petrol re-affirms, for the 21st century, the traditional gift for storytelling long associated with Irish writers, in a wholly unique and enrapturing manner’. – Tony Murray, Director, Irish Studies Centre, London Metropolitan University
‘Here, the world turns upon a pub, a petrol pump and an impossible love. … Martina Evans’ world is transfixed by personal drama, by epiphanies in bars and Icebergs, Aztecs and Bloody Marys creating a kind of alcoholic, consumerist birdlife that sings above the human drama. Evans’ imagination is a unique one, darting, flitting, resonating with personal and poetic voices. As a poet she is one of a kind and brilliant.’ – Thomas McCarthy
‘In the wings of Imelda’s small world, there’s a cast of locals who sit on their high stools around the bar and call to the shop to fill their petrol tanks and collect their “messages”. They lend such texture and authenticity that the seemingly humdrum events of the McConnell sisters’ history are every bit as complex, tumultuous, humorous and tragic as any of the films, television programmes and books which surround Imelda, from Ryan’s Daughter, to Night Gallery, to Catcher in the Rye.’ Sara Baume Southword Magazine
BLOODY Marys, Jaysus! Granddad was disgusted beside the range, Lucky standing on his lap, wet nose pointing high in the air when Agnes ran in from the bar, her brown velour arm wrapped around the plastic ball of the Coca-Cola ice bucket. It’s far from ice they were reared! Granddad said but Justin always made Bloody Marys for his favourites, slim dark women who wore their clothes like Jackie Kennedy. It was a big operation with all the stuff and the Tabasco sauce stirred with a long clanking spoon. Granddad ground his teeth as Agnes tore the tray from the side of the yellow-iced freezer, staggering on her high brown clogs in her modest A-line corduroy skirt. I, too, was thinking she was too good for this work. They don’t know what they want, Granddad said. Ice one minute, hot whiskeys the next.Those bloody women, the Bloody Mary drinkers. And his last comment when the ice cubes tumbled into the Coca-Cola bucket, every single woman that Justin ever took on suffered from her nerves.
from Petrol, Anvil Press 2012
click here to read more excerpts from Petrol
Available to buy from Anvil Press and Amazon