Martha Lucas
by Antony Christie
£12 (pub. 2024)

Release date: 19 September 2024. Pre-purchase NOW.

“These fascinating and beautifully poised lyric poems examine the turning of history through the story of Martha Lucas and her family. The ways women were both constricted by circumstance, and yet manage to survive, and thrive, are held up to the light, as Antony Christie skilfully weaves the personal and the social together, drawing from what is known and what can only be imagined.”

Kim Moore

More praise for Martha Lucas:

“In Martha Lucas, Antony Christie explores the migrant experience of nineteenth century Ireland: 'the shadowland / of thin men / and bone women'.  Christie's poetic line is precise, his characters lucidly crafted. Their hardships, joys, griefs and losses are conveyed with compassion and love, but never sentimentality. Childhood sequences are heavily bound to the land with 'tongues and fingers dark with berry blood', and they sing with the 'harmonies of wet grass and cattle'. But even when the homeland is left behind, the imagery of city life in Liverpool (home fires, fever, food and industry) is richly conveyed through the language of the seamstress Martha becomes. In this ambitious collection , Christie gives a voice to history that celebrates diversity and the paraphernalia of a life (the thimbles, the hats and coats, the peg dolls), even in the face of hardship. Lives are counted and measured by the relationships that bind them. Memory is fierce and powerful but 'without tears or longing'. 

Clare Proctor

“This excellent collection can be inhabited like a novel. It combines lyric and narrative to embody an absorbing story of famine and exile in a world that is entirely convincing.  From the beginning where Martha is a small child fascinated by her grandfather ‘breathing smoke’ in the farm in Co. Cavan in the 1830s to Martha as an a old woman with ‘blunt claws’ looked after by her granddaughter in Liverpool in the 1900s, the experience is conveyed through her consciousness with a powerful, sophisticated and moving lyricism.”

Carole Coates

“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. In Liverpool, having become an accomplished needlewoman, Martha stitches together a moving and clear-eyed account of family members, their sickness and death, triumphs and marriages, yet still remembering Rallaghan where ‘we huddled in the rushes by the tumbled walls / made our own fierce stories’. We learn of the epidemics of typhus, bronchitis and fevers, and in old age, her stories become ‘worn thoughts’. Christie’s language is sensuous and precise, sympathetic but unsparingly visceral. 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

Rallaghan in late summer
1851

the barley is almost ready, the hay cut
and the field men slow walk
into the steadiness of ditching
and hedging –

I watch all this through clouded glass.
part of me wields needle or knife,
patching or peeling
as I am bidden – I have lost my trust.
even the doctor’s youngest is dead

and the man stories of fort and faery,
the god stories of hell pit and sky home,
stick in my throat like bad bread –
the birds’ songs are like sand flowing,
I could name them all once, but will not.

the sun stares at us day after day –
I hear them talking:
our lease is questionable,
but we must hold it all together
as long as we can.

(from Martha Lucas)