American Mules

In American Mules, Martina Evans keeps the reader in close and constant orbit. Lines such as “I think of horses as I go down the steps / today” and “I heard a song / and when I peered out, I knew it was / eight o’clock,” anchor the reader, making us cognizant of each passing minute, of overlapping vivid mental simulations (horses and songs) and their corresponding actions in the real world (descending steps and telling time), and of how the skies, seagulls, ambulances, and “low earthquake of cars” unfold as a simultaneous apparition. This skill of panoramic assessment is explored in poems like “Radiographers are the Coldest of All,” where the poet, who worked as a radiographer, acts as transient guardian of the ill with translucent gaze.

Once on a twenty-four
hour shift, I could have looked right
through the man on the table, going
into the Cat Scanner and refused
to laugh when he wondered aloud
like so many who had gone before him,
if he had any brain at all.

Because the poems are largely recollections of Ireland or set in the contemporary streets of the Dalston and Hackney neighborhoods in London, the title of the book, which comes from the titular poem about a pair of borrowed shoes from an American named Mary, might strike as a little strange. But as the poem ends with the poet, having tripped in heels on a polished station floor, hopping barefoot to get a taxi, this image of the “fallen poet” adapting in real time seems appropriate for a collection which is about, in many ways, how we reinvent circumstances.

It gave me immense pleasure to read an Irish poet whose syntax and diction estranged (in the best way) the American English poetry I read all the time, and offered such musical and witty reward:

I never
saw a cat yet that didn’t make a fool
out of Greta. I had to put a stop
to them after the last fella died.