Poets who write novels are often seen by their fellow poets as having gone over to the dark side. There is a sense of betrayal, a feeling of letting the Company of Poets down. So, what should we make of Martina Evans, a writer whose three novels Midnight Feast (1996), The Glass Mountain (1997), and No Drinking, No Dancing, No Doctors (2001), appeared alongside her first three poetry collections? After 2001, it would appear, Evans renounced the temptations of fiction. Since then, she has published exclusively poetry—a total of nine collections, including her latest, The Coming Thing. Novelists might say that she hasn’t shaken the addiction yet, though, as her most recent work is marked by the form of the prose poem. Last year’s The Coming Thing sees the return of Imelda, the protagonist of Petrol, a volume of prose poetry Evans published in 2012. In Petrol, Imelda was a schoolgirl living in rural Ireland; in this new volume, Imelda is a college student in Cork at the beginning of the 1980s. Readers of Evans’ second novel, The Glass Mountain, as well as Through the Glass Mountain, her 2013 prose poem re-incarnation of that novel, will also recognise this terrain. Each of these books attempts to chart the difficulties of life for young women in early 1980s Ireland—the pressures to conform to family expectations, the lack of access to contraception, the atmosphere of unrest and despair that characterised the country at that time. With a tighter, more compressed form than Evans’ previous fictional and poetic explorations of these themes, this new book is an opportunity to ask: how does the form of the prose poem change our reading experience? By disrupting the verse/prose binary, how does it allow new insights into familiar territory?
The prose poem first appeared in Europe in nineteenth-century France. Famously pioneered by Baudelaire, it was a response to social transformations caused by a new urban environment that questioned the role and function of the poet in an increasingly capitalist society. Although its French exponents, such as Francis Ponge, with his object poems, have continued to explore the genre with brio, in recent years, anglophone practitioners, like Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine, have been its star performers. Like their predecessors, from Gertrude Stein to Ania Walwicz, they use the form to explore questions of gender, power, and genre. The prose poem undermines conventions and spans the divide between high and low culture; it is also, the critic Alyson Miller suggests, especially well equipped to get at what is ‘fluid and coming into being’. Along these lines, the title of Evans’ new collection, The Coming Thing, most explicitly a reference to computing (which the protagonist’s father views as ‘the coming thing’ in terms of employability), also gestures more broadly towards a society and a subjectivity in flux.
In an Irish context, Seamus Heaney famously experimented with the prose poem in his collection Stations, though he excluded the poems in this collection from his main body of work and they were not published by Faber until Opened Ground (1998). He quibbled with Dennis O’Driscoll when the latter referred to them as prose poems, suggesting the David Jones term ‘writings’ was more appropriate, and concluded by declaring: ‘Each is a making over into words that are more self-conscious than the usual prose record and yet not justified as verse’. With the rise of creative non-fiction and compressed flash fiction forms, the ambiguous formal status of the prose poem continues to generate debate. Although it remains a minority pursuit in contemporary Irish poetry, with the notable exceptions of Maurice Scully and Trevor Joyce, there are signs of continued curiosity around the form—take Ellen Dillon’s 2023 collection Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel, for example, or, arguably, sections of Vona Groarke’s Hereafter, the Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara, with its exploration of visual and material culture.
In The Coming Thing, Evans’ practice is closer to the intimacy of Anne Carson in The Beauty of the Husband (though Carson calls her ‘29 tangos’ an essay) than the Rankine of Citizen, where Rankine’s ‘you’ pronoun and photographs endow the text with greater distance. The ‘I’ of Evans’ work feels more personal; Imelda’s voice as first-person narrator is introspective and heady, marking a clear shift from the third-person narration of Evans’ fiction. Evans experiments with frames and the poems here include line breaks, a formal characteristic typically absent from the prose poem, if Jeremy Noel-Tod’s introduction to the 2017 Penguin Book of the Prose Poem is to be believed. Each of the 75 poems in The Coming Thing sequence is fitted into a fourteen-line frame. Are they sonnets? Well, not entirely, as they are written in prose. We get none of the intertwined end rhymes of the traditional sonnet, but we do get internal rhyme and repetition, a ghostly shifting idea of the octet/sextet/quartet, frequent volta surges in the closing lines, and, of course, the line breaks. Through Imelda’s intense first-person voice, the poems offer a chatty stream of consciousness narrative that might be termed garrulous were it not for the formal structure in which the voice is contained. They are full of run-on-lines and use a recognisably Irish-English idiom, including the repeated and endearing use of the word ‘cat’ as an adjective meaning bad (‘he said the chips in Mandy’s were fucking cat’), ‘fierce’ as an intensifier (‘I was fierce proud of his shaved head’), or the ‘after getting’ sentence structure (‘she was after getting her grant money’).
While Baudelaire’s prose poem brought us the city-walker or flaneur, The Coming Thing introduces the pogo-eur. Pogoing is the verb used to describe the frenetic dancing by Imelda, a wannabe punkette, and her friends in Cork’s Arcadia Ballroom. It also serves to convey her back-and-forth movement between her college science course, which she is taking due to her father’s demands (‘After I doing Science to be sensible like Agnes!’), and the counter-cultural scene she inhabits with relish. In a city beset with social problems, where the dilemma of possibly pregnant women is already referred to as ‘Trouble’, the backdrop of the larger ‘Troubles’ north of the border looms large. Hunger strikers Seán Mac Stiofáin, Bobby Sands, and the Price sisters are all name-checked. The book’s striking colour scheme (steel-blue, lime-green, bubble-gum pink) is a reminder of the ongoing connection between the prose poem and visual art, as exemplified by art critic-writers such as Jacques Dupin. It also reflects the heightened sensibilities of students doing ‘pondies’ (‘Pondies were Pondrex, slimming tablets for women’) and drinking cider to a soundtrack of the Beat, the Specials, and Joy Division. This is the scene explored in Paul McDermott’s radio documentary, Get That Monster Off the Stage, and it is possible that Imelda’s friends Jimmy, Best, and Tom may be based on the real punk musicians of the period. 1980s Cork as an anchor for these poems is reinforced by mentions of key sites such as the Wilton Shopping Centre (opened in 1979), the aforementioned Arcadia Ballroom (closed 1984), the Long Valley Bar (still going strong), the Tuckey Street Family Planning Clinic (denounced by Bishop Cornelius Lucey in 1975) and The Western Star pub, described as ‘A Cess pit for Dropouts’, which was demolished in 2008.
Much of the frenetic energy deployed in the book reflects the life of student-Imelda experiencing freedom in an urban setting. However, there is also a more sinister patriarchal force lurking in the poem, introduced on the very first page via a quotation from ‘The Mouse’s Tale’, a poem in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, constructed in the form of a mouse’s tail: ‘“I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury,” said cunning old Fury.’ Evans omits the concluding lines of ‘The Mouse’s Tale’, ‘I’ll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death’, but these ominous words are connected with Imelda’s father, Justin, who also appeared in Petrol. Justin is a Bluebeard figure of terror and persecution, a misogynist, obsessed with money and social status, who has had three wives. His surveillance of Imelda does not stop when she moves to Cork, where she thought she was ‘pure invisible’: ‘Justin’s black tar eyes running/everywhere’; elsewhere she refers to his informants ‘But someone was giving Justin/information. Like in a police state’. Recurring tales and tails are woven through the poem—the tales recounted by Imelda that form the body of the text and the mysteriously recurring Erin oxtail soup that becomes one of the main sources of nourishment in the book. Evans exploits the ambiguity of homophony, playing with language and identity in ways reminiscent of Lewis Carroll: ‘Cork city & Knocklong merged. When one was above ground,/ the other creaked under foot.’
Despite Justin’s best efforts at surveillance, Imelda and her friend Dora have to take the boat to England. Poems 60–71 are set in London, as the friends deal with their ‘Trouble’. Mentions of the words pregnancy or abortion are conspicuously absent; instead, we get insights into the questions that beset the girls: ‘Wasn’t it/ illegal? We didn’t know. Was it Murder?’ When they arrive in London, the psychogeography of the penitential territory into which they have strayed becomes apparent—the boarding house in Pentonville, the underground station named Holloway. London is a hallucinatory inferno of a place, full of bars, alleys, tube lines, and a public house that was once an Edwardian lavatory. Evans points to the gendered inequalities of Imelda’s experience: her boyfriend abandons her at the clinic. Later, Imelda will reflect ‘I’d caused enough trouble’. This section is also an exploration of the othered, peripheral nature of being Irish in Britain in the early 1980s. In London, Tom tells a Belfast protestant barman ‘We’re all Paddies now!’; ‘a relief & a disguise like wearing a uniform,’ thinks Imelda.
The conclusion sees the protagonists return to Cork, where the book reaches full ironic self-reflexiveness when the bartender in the Long Valley responds to a white-haired man’s shouting about the Nobel Prize for Poetry with the phrase ‘The poets are at it again!’, to which Imelda responds ‘Are there poets in Cork?’
The Coming Thing is a complex book. Distinct from its predecessors, The Glass Mountain, Through the Glass Mountain, and Petrol, the heightened brevity of its compressed form hits the reader with the full blast of joy and angst that characterise Imelda’s life as we buzz through the pages high on mad panicked anxiety, vicariously sipping Dubonnet and slugging bottles of Stag and Benylin cough mixture.
Freed from fiction’s narratorial interventions and expectations of plot resolution, The Coming Thing blends the distillation of poetry and the looseness of prose into a restless, beating text that captures the context of a city and a people fizzing to escape.