Now we can Talk Openly About Men by Martina Evans

From Goodreads

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.

My thoughts

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 can say.  It tries to relate to us the lives of two women who lived in Ireland in the 1920's.  

I didn't love it and I didn't hate it.  Am I glad that I read it?  I could answer that as yes, as it was escapism through her writing into a time that I didn't live in.