Martina Evans’s Today We Can Chat Openly about Guys is a pair of dramatic monologues, snapshots of the lives of two ladies in 1920s Ireland. The initial, Kitty Donovan, can be a dressmaker in enough time of the Irish Battle of Independence. The next, Babe Cronin, is defined in 1924, shortly after the Irish Civil War. Kitty is usually a dressmaker with a flavor for laudanum. Babe is usually a stenographer that has fallen deeply in love with a young groundbreaking. Through their independent, overlapping tales, Evans colours a time and a lifestyle rarely voiced in verse.

Problem some years off their tales, both women find a strand of humour in what occurred, even as they recall the enthusiasm, vertigo and terror of those occasions. A dream-like compulsion within their voices adds a feeling of retrospective inevitability. The use of intense, almost psychedelic color in the initial half from the publication opposes the flattened, monochrome vocabulary of the second half. This is a work of vivid contrasts, old and youth, men and women, the Irish as well as the British: complementary tales of balance, imbalance, and changeover.