Now We Can Talk Openly About Men: Poems Audiobook (Free)

Martina Evans’s Now We Can Talk Openly about Males is a set of dramatic monologues, snapshots from the lives of two women in 1920s Ireland. The initial, Kitty Donovan, is certainly a dressmaker in enough time from the Irish War of Independence. The second, Babe Cronin, is defined in 1924, soon after the Irish Civil War. Kitty is certainly a dressmaker using a taste for laudanum. Babe is normally a stenographer who has fallen deeply in love with a young revolutionary. Through their independent, overlapping tales, Evans colours an era and a tradition rarely voiced in verse.

Set back some years using their stories, both women find a strand of humour in what took place, even as they recall the enthusiasm, vertigo and terror of those situations. A dream-like compulsion within their voices adds a feeling of retrospective inevitability. The use of intense, nearly psychedelic color in the first half from the publication opposes the flattened, monochrome language of the next half. This is a work of vivid contrasts, old and youth, people, the Irish and the British: complementary tales of stability, imbalance, and changeover.