'Now We Can Talk Openly About Men' - Martina Evans

Contact: jazmine@carcanet.co.uk

Martina Evans is launching her new collection 'Now We Can Talk Openly About Men' (Carcanet), in conversation with Catriona Crowe.

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.

Entry: Free (booking required)

Time: 7:00pm