Martha Lucas - Antony Christie

"This poem sequence, which reads like an intimate diary, imagines and bestows a living voice to a 19th century Irishwoman, whose family left their farm at Rallaghan, Co. Cavan, after the famine and settled in Liverpool. Martha Lucas, like her creator-poet, has the storyteller's gift. Working entirely from records and documented births, marriages and deaths, the poet summons up the vibrant, breathing days of this impoverished immigrant family. This is a story I could not put down, poems that document the triumph of the human spirit, the work of a rare poetic imagination." - Anna Crowe