Irene Evans was born in Scotland in 1943 and now lives in Muthill Perthshire. She has worked as a teacher, gardener and B&B landlady. In 2001 she was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Writer’s Bursary and is widely published in anthologies and magazines.

 

‘It is good to see Irene Evans’ highly individual, unflinchingly honest poems, with their singular blend of clear-eyed compassion and quiet rage, brought together in a collection which should introduce this self-effacing poet to a much wider audience. Irene writes of domestic detail, family tensions, the ordinary stuff of ‘daily life, like bread, gently, rising’ with an acerbic tenderness. But she is far from narrow in her imaginative range. She is able to speak convincingly in the voice of Circe, to conjure the quirks and foibles of medieval nuns in a manuscript illumination, in a particularly memorable poem to let us see, through the eyes of the man who buried his one talent, the injustice of that parable. There is nothing showy in these poems, sharp in their observation, scrupulous in their self-interrogation, often wryly humorous. They speak truth to our confused and confusing times.’

 

—A. C. Clarke

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