Martina Evans grew up in County Cork, the youngest of ten children. She trained as a radiographer at St Vincent’s Hospital Dublin. She moved to London in 1988 and after 14years in radiography became a full time writer in 1996. Her poems have been published widely in newspapers and magazines. Her poetry books are The Iniscarra Bar and Cycle Rest, Rockingham Press 1995 All Alcoholics Are Charmers Anvil Press 1998 and Can Dentists Be Trusted? Anvil Press 2004. She won the Betty Trask award for her first novel Midnight Feast and an Arts Council Award for her third novel No Drinking No Dancing No Doctors in 1999. Her other novel is The Glass Mountain. She is a Creative Writing tutor at the Cit Lit, Centreprise Literature Development Project and Queen Mary University of London and lives in East London with her daughter Liadain.
Quelle: poetry p f
The Australian Rug
Some visitors brought it
years ago. It was made of cashmere
I think, too good anyway
my mother said, for picnics.
Fawn and milky cocoa-coloured
pink-brown and cream, it smelled
sweet and nutty like those
soft toy-like kangaroos, koalas and wallabies
I imagined below my Corkonian feet,
hopping along in a hot dream world of gum trees
where the Kookaburra laughed his head off.
My father’s lips pursed with pleasure
when he uttered the name of a place called Geelong,
as if he was getting ready to blow
into an invisible Didgeridoo.
I put my nose to the rug’s folded sweetness,
whispering
kangaroo, koala, wallaby,
thinking of the picnics to come
when the rug would be old enough
to take out and spread down by the river.
Years later, searching in the Hot Press
I found it, still folded, old and strangely
odourless. The moths had eaten right through
and when I opened it up, the holes formed
a pattern like those snowflakes and stars
we made out of paper years ago.
years ago. It was made of cashmere
I think, too good anyway
my mother said, for picnics.
Fawn and milky cocoa-coloured
pink-brown and cream, it smelled
sweet and nutty like those
soft toy-like kangaroos, koalas and wallabies
I imagined below my Corkonian feet,
hopping along in a hot dream world of gum trees
where the Kookaburra laughed his head off.
My father’s lips pursed with pleasure
when he uttered the name of a place called Geelong,
as if he was getting ready to blow
into an invisible Didgeridoo.
I put my nose to the rug’s folded sweetness,
whispering
kangaroo, koala, wallaby,
thinking of the picnics to come
when the rug would be old enough
to take out and spread down by the river.
Years later, searching in the Hot Press
I found it, still folded, old and strangely
odourless. The moths had eaten right through
and when I opened it up, the holes formed
a pattern like those snowflakes and stars
we made out of paper years ago.
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