MEMartina Evans

1. Article · Aug 23, 2026 · Martina Evans

   New poetry: Frank Ormsby’s tremendous poems loom out of darkness, shot with stars, lit with sound (opens the original)

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   “The servants were kept out of sight … A sunken road excluded them from views through the big windows.” Frank Ormsby’s powerful, austere The Tumbling Paddy (Bloodaxe, £12.99) begins in darkness, with the sequence Florence Court and the Marble Arch Caves. Florence Court was designed to keep servants out of sight, “So their lives went underground, or their voices became,/for centuries, a trickle in high-ceilinged rooms,/their faces pools of absence.” These concealed servants are a for

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2. Article · Aug 1, 2026 · Martina Evans

   The Poems of Sylvia Plath review: Leaping virtuoso from the page, clear as a bell (opens the original)

   Excerpt · Positive tone · English

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   Drawing on decades of research for this scholarly volume, Amanda Golden and Karen Kukil tactfully steer readers away from Sylvia Plath’s notorious death to focus on the life of her vital hard-won poems. Their introduction affirms how Plath “taught readers to love poetry”, humanising “poetry’s difficulty for readers, inspiring them with her conviction that creating art from the reality of one’s life is of the utmost importance”. In the forty years since Ted Hughes published the Puli

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3. Article · Jul 11, 2026 · Martina Evans

   Seamus Heaney’s translations: An exploration of a gifted work (opens the original)

   Excerpt · Positive tone · English

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   Eugene O’Brien’s introduction to 11 chapters exploring Seamus Heaney’s gifted translations opens with the “helmeted pump” in Heaney’s essay Mossbawn where he links the pump with “the Greek word, omphalos, meaning ... navel ... hence the stone that marked the centre of the world” and repeating it “until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pumping water at the pump outside our back door”. O’Brien sees this “seminal point” as a carrying over or transl

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• LEONARD COHEN1 piece
• Dark Wood1 piece
• Bell Jar1 piece
• Red Comet1 piece