Now We Can Talk Openly About Men, Martina Evans
Now We Can Talk Openly About Men, Martina Evans
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Now We Can Talk Openly About Men
Poems

Author: Martina Evans

Narrator: Martina Evans, Colin Still

Unabridged: 1 hr 19 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Carcanet Press

Published: 01/30/2020

Synopsis

Martina Evans's Now We Can Talk Openly about Men is a pair of dramatic monologues, snapshots of the lives of two women in 1920s Ireland. The first, Kitty Donovan, is a dressmaker in the time of the Irish War of Independence. The second, Babe Cronin, is set in 1924, shortly after the Irish Civil War. Kitty is a dressmaker with a taste for laudanum. Babe is a stenographer who has fallen in love with a young revolutionary. Through their separate, overlapping stories, Evans colours an era and a culture seldom voiced in verse.Set back some years from their stories, both women find a strand of humour in what took place, even as they recall the passion, vertigo and terror of those times. A dream-like compulsion in their voices adds a sense of retrospective inevitability. The use of intense, almost psychedelic colour in the first half of the book opposes the flattened, monochrome language of the second half. This is a work of vivid contrasts, of age and youth, women and men, the Irish and the English: complementary stories of balance, imbalance, and transition.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Rosamund on January 28, 2023

A series of bold, compelling and intricately crafted monologues tell the story of Eileen Murphy, a young revolutionary, in 1920s Ireland. Except for the last few lines of the final poem, Eileen never gets to speak for herself: instead, we learn about her through the opinions and stories of Kitty Don......more

Goodreads review by Bernadette on September 24, 2022

I found this poetry anthology when looking for a book by Harriet Evans. Firstly, can I say that it's not really poetry. It's an odd sort of book to label really. This is a book of two parts and many chapters. It's a quick read, but it's an odd read. It's an odd book to review too and that's all I ca......more

Goodreads review by Eolann on September 12, 2021

A quick read; two brief monologues, one set in the Irish war for indepence and another a few years after in the civil war. The author is a poet but the two parts feel more like traditional fiction rather than poetry. Both start off very engaging but I'm not sure the conclusions worked in either. P.S......more

Goodreads review by Kristiana on June 18, 2022

Not sure about the title as it centers on Eileen, a member of the female division of the IRA between 1912 - 1924. Her story is told through two dramatic monologues from her adopted aunt and another woman who knew her and fell in love with her. The story itself focuses on the Troubles in Ireland and......more

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