All Alcoholics Are Charmers

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. Martina Evans (b. 1961) grew up in Co. Cork. She trained as a radiographer at St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin, and moved to London in 1988. Her first collection of poems, The Inniscarra Bar and Cycle Rest' appeared in 1995.