(Anvil Press, 2004)
'Evans’s Irish childhood and education in the 1960s is vividly represented…the poems take up the themes in funny and rather disturbing precise accounts of her parents, their sweet shop, recalcitrant cats, school (‘filling the inkwells from the greatest earthenware pot’) and the monologues of Catholic mothers…and now Father Flynn is all over the tabloids”. These look like easy anecdotal poems but they bite. And those dentists - if they are private/they may well want all your teeth…[with you] laid out on the chair/like a corpse/ with a coin in its mouth/travelling/towards the underworld.'
- Alan Brownjohn, The Sunday Times
'Although I have a cat, I don’t particularly like cat poems. I was all the more surprised, therefore, to find I had fallen in love with Eileen Murphy. Eileen is (or was) Martina Evans’ cat and she is celebrated in at least two of the excellent poems in this volume. In fact, she is the star of the show so far as I am concerned. She empathises in uncertain terms with her poet-owner who had endured ”fifteen court readings” defending her “right to write”:
‘Oh but I can imagine it,’ said Eileen.
her yellow eyes opening wide
before narrowing into two benevolent slits.’
This is a subtly funny poem, an unmitigated delight. ... Evans is very good at character and detail. Mr Shinkwin, the dentist, for example, his eyes “blazing blue/as the Atlantic ocean”, and Paddy from Dingle ”his lips moving repeatedly,/up to his hilt/ in communications /with another world”. The precise sensual focus often shocked me into unexpected empathy: “Golden brown tea as good as I drank/out of pink and white cups/in the Convent of Mercy thirty years ago”. I was disarmed by the bitter-sweet, unmistakeable taste of the past, even though it was a past I didn’t share. Good writing can do that.'
- Helena Nelson, Ambit
