(Anvil Press, 2009)
A TLS Book of the Year, See reviews below.
‘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. Tragedy and cheerfulness are inextricable here. Facing the Public is my book of the year.’
- Bernard O’Donoghue
'The poems get livelier and stronger with every book, while losing none of the undercurrent of rueful humour. The title poem is an excellent example, but the recall of significant and haunting detail is present in so many of the poems.'
- Alan Brownjohn
Review in The Irish Times
'Like Hardie, Martina Evans has a dual reputation as poet and novelist and it is her talent for narrative that propels Facing the Public. Family lore and local anecdote from Cork to London are the stuff of these poems: the Christmas lock-ins at the family pub; a parent’s reprimand for cycling too freely; a child’s decision to bury a dead dog upright. None of these events in themselves seem to matter too much for all they are engagingly told. But the title and the sequencing call for greater attention. Throughout the book, children watch from the sidelines of adult life and hesitate about stepping forward, fearing the consequences.
On the cover is a striking photograph of six babies from the Hackney Workhouse sitting in a pram, their nurse standing over them. It is not a tender image. The book opens with memories of how the Black and Tans used children as informers. This is followed by a dramatic monologue in which a court welfare officer outlines the limits of her responsibility to a child. Three prose adaptations from Ernie O’Malley’s account of the War of Independence make for powerful, concluding poems. All together they suggest a larger thesis frames these recollections. It seems then that Evans’s title can be turned on its head; that this violence shaped the rearing of Irish children for generations, a legacy to which public servants failed to face up.
Sometimes
the singing voices from the bar were
very near,
they sang A Nation Once Again which
was
companionable. Or I’m nobody’s child
which was like a soundless hole in my
throat . . . (The Blue Room)
This is a deceptively casual and enjoyable collection.'
- Selina Guinness (The Irish Times)
Review from Ambit (Issue 199)
This collection of poetry begins with a clear reference point. The front cover image shows a scene from the Hackney workhouse in 1902: a nurse stands behind a pram packed with at least six babies. The first poem, ‘Two Hostages’, describes the photograph, taken the year the writer’s father was born and sets the tone for several political and beautiful poems.
Ireland stands tall behind many, if not all the poems in this collection, but England is inevitably there, as present but perhaps not as proud and the image from 1902 connects the two places to the beginnings of war. As ‘Two Hostages’ explains: ‘Could any of these babies come out of Hackney / to put on the Black and Tan uniform?’
Evans highlights the brutality and fear felt in Cork during the Irish uprising and the first few poems show how grandparents, parents and community are affected by the British mercenary police sent by Lloyd George. ‘Reprisal’ has a particularly arresting image here:
if the Tans found a corpse
they’d be burnt to the ground.
Mrs Bennett, standing there, stuffing sausages
her seventeen-year-old son’s body lying in a ditch.
‘The Boy from Durras’ describes the moment when the Black and Tans pick up a teenager from the streets and ask him for information. No-one knows if the boy ever gives them what they need, but an IRA safehouse is raided that same night, resulting in the boy being ‘tied to a horse / and cart and dragged. . . / as far as Dromore before they stopped.’
These poems are when Evans is at her best. Distinct voices give the feel of locals whispering to each other in the local bars; she creates a sharpened sense of a local community in Ireland during the battle for independence.
As the poems branch out in place and history the collection becomes one dealing with conflict in many disparate forms. ‘Court Welfare Officer’ shows impotence in the face of a silent child, while Omar Khadr centres on the youngest Guantanamo detainee. Each of them link back to a sense of home, history and childhood perception. Towards the middle, poems such as ‘Facing the Public’ and ‘Desperate Men’ look at a childhood spent with a mother running the local pub, moaning non-stop to her children about her workload. The intrinsically Irish feel to these poems does not alienate and Evans writes with wit and a lightness of touch that works well in a collection showing how the present stems from the past and the past always looks to the present.'
Daisy Bowie-Sell
Ambit 199
Other reviews online:
Cosmopolitan
Bibliophilic Blogger
Southword