Now We Can Talk Openly about Men

Martina Evans

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781784105785
• eBook ISBN: 9781784105792
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award.
Shortlisted for the 2019 Pigott Poetry Award.
Shortlisted for the 2019 Roehampton Poetry Prize.
Featured in the TLS & Irish Times Books of the Year 2018.
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.

PART ONE

MRS KITTY DONAVAN

MALLOW, 1919

1.

I was in a weakness. I couldn’t stand up,

leant back against the wall like a drunkard.

Was that Himself I’d seen on the back

of a Crossley tender on Main Street?

The truck came down the hill & out

of the back appeared — a pair of red eyes.

They pinned me, bored me. It was an outrage.

A small Tan or maybe an Auxie, lounging

in the back against the canvas with a bayonet

pointed at my waist. The head off Himself

in a cracked leather coat with goggles

hanging round his neck. After twelve years.

Could he have clambered out the other

side of Sullivan’s Quay that night in Cork

ran away fast with his bowler under

his arm? We never found the hat although

Eileen Murphy & myself searched high

& low, tearing the damp walls, our hands

bright green from the moss.

2.

Eileen Murphy was tough out. I should have

listened to her that night when she said

to shove his head down in the water with

my boot. I wanted him to be taken by God

with no hand in it at all myself but

of course that was a Sin of Omission

so I was a black sinner too. We should have

called the constabulary the minute

he slithered in. They say a drunkard

has more lives than a cat. Lurching up the road

every night, steamed to the gills, taking the two

sides of Blarney Street – horses & carts

the whole lot & not a hair of his head

damaged. His white collar shining in the green

gaslight. How many times did he fall down

& rise again like an India rubber ball?

& what was there to stop him rising

again? The body wasn’t found & no one

saw Jesus rise on Easter Sunday either.

He is not here, for he has risen, as he said

he would. Come & see the place where he lay –

& that is the gospel according to Matthew.

3.

My brain wouldn’t run straight in its track,

lurching & shooting red electric sparks

up the right side of my face. We’d a doing

from the Tans in June, the night of the attack

on Eileen but this was worse. Because staring

hurts worst of all. This fellow was morning-

sober not like the Tans who couldn’t see

straight with the drink. One fellow held himself

up with his rifle, using it like a walking stick

to stop himself from falling down. Trying to

do the big man before Flora. The fellow

in charge leant up against the wall for balance,

left a green smear after him. I was scrubbing

for days. You never knew what way they’d turn.

A Tan might be sticking his head under

the hood of a baby’s pram saying he couldn’t

get over the blue eyes of the Irish,

next he’d be trying to click with a girl,

then you could turn a corner & a gang

of them would be stamping on an old man’s hand.

People ran like chickens in front. Savage

drivers but expert. The tenders swept carts,

people & animals into the ditches –

pirate patches over their eyes, metal hooks

instead of hands slashi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• Dramatis Personae
• About the Author
• Also by Martina Evans from Carcanet Press
• Copyright