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Price: €12.00
Time Gentlemen, Please
March 2008
The Boy with No Face
February 2005
Frightening New Furniture |
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| Kevin Higgins |
ISBN: 978-1-907056-25-3 Page Count: 96 Publication Date: Monday, March 01, 2010 Cover Artwork: Plastic Chairs © Steve Lovegrove | Dreamstime.com |
About this Book
In poems laced with the blackest humour Kevin Higgins spares no-one, least of all himself. In this his third collection of poetry, he takes the reader through the hubris of boom time Ireland and out the other side into a strange country where everything is suddenly broken again. Just when Ireland imagined itself to have finally escaped history, the statues of virgins and freedom fighters are on the move again. Higgins goes all the way into the dark to investigate what’s left when youthful political idealism – his ‘old political furniture’ – gives way under the sheer weight of what actually happens. As ever, the City of Galway is one of his pet subjects, and he takes time out to bring to hilarious life its bookshop romancers and women who decide to be fascinating. “a social critique as lithe and imaginative as that of the con-merchants who run the show…A satire which eschews moderation and openly admits its own savagery can only succeed.” Justin Quinn, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800-2000 “He is the only one of my Irish contemporaries who makes me laugh out loud regularly, not just because the work is funny, but because it has that great sense of character behind it, where one pictures the speaker in all his curmudgeonly grumpy-old-man-ness glaring at the reader wondering what the hell they’re laughing at!” Nigel McLoughlin, Iota “The left should hurry to welcome this collection. Here is poetry that we can identify with, that tells of our hopes and fears and doubts and questions, that puts our lives on the map too. The fact that one of our own can tell such stories in a way that is so powerful and satisfying is something to be proud of.” Joe Conroy, Red Banner magazine “This is work which raises the question of what the political poem can be, for us now, in our several cultures.” Siobhan Campbell, www.dissentmagazine.org “wonderfully inventive imagery” Laurie Smith, Magma
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Author Biography
Kevin Higgins is co-organiser of Over The Edge literary events. He facilitates poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre; teaches creative writing at Galway Technical Institute and on the Brothers of Charity Away With Words programme. He is also Writer-in-Residence at Merlin Park Hospital and the poetry critic of the Galway Advertiser. His first collection of poems The Boy With No Face was published by Salmon in February 2005 and was short-listed for the 2006 Strong Award. His second collection, Time Gentlemen, Please, was published in March 2008 by Salmon. One of the poems from Time Gentlemen, Please, ‘My Militant Tendency’, features in the Forward Book of Poetry 2009. One of the poems in this collection, ‘Ourselves Again’, appeared in Best of Irish Poetry 2009 (Southword Editions). His work also features in the The Watchful Heart – A New Generation of Irish Poets (Ed Joan McBreen, Salmon Poetry) & in Identity Parade – New British and Irish Poets (Ed Roddy Lumsden, Bloodaxe, 2010).
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Sample PoemsYesterday’s Pinstripe Suit |
Reviews
Review: Burning the Tiger's vanities, a review by Eamon Grennan, The Irish Times, Saturday 7th August 2010 WITH BACKSTAGE guardians in Paul Durcan (see his titles) and Patrick Kavanagh, Kevin Higgins’s work has a buoyant spoken immediacy (often taking the form of dramatic monologues), his poems springing out of colloquial address and celebrating the ordinary through a use of quotidian bric-a-brac, which he often pits – with positive effect – against larger (but no more important) forces. Many of his poems are lively performances, crammed with contemporary cultural references. In addition he is able to strike more muted emotional notes (as in a fine poem for his mother). He has a shrewd eye for the telling detail, matched by a decisive self-awareness. He’s a satirist with heart and humour, mixing autobiography with a sharply critical sense of the public world. In his biographical (fictional or factual) journey from radical revolutionary street idealist to zones of liberal middle class comfort (“My face/ the poster for a failed revolution”), he rigs a bonfire of Celtic Tiger vanities into a comico-satirical documentary montage.Some of his best work is in small biographical vignettes, seeing the past through a glass clearly, or recalling the anorak angst of Days (“Whatever happened to alienation?”). His poems are like world-ranging word documentaries – speedy and to the point. In this vigorous elimination of “my old political furniture” he sends outdated radical agendas up in smoke. Comedy is part of his poetics, and what I especially like in his work is its swiftness of wit, its tone of buoyant contrarianism and jubilant disappointment, how he is a cocky, wisecracking inhabitant of “Angryville”. Sometimes, however, for all his inventively good-humoured extravaganzas, or his sometimes surreal touch with metaphor and simile, the fun can fall a bit flat, endings can pall, the satire can get a bit bland, while attempts at form in some poems tend not to rise above the level of workshop exercises. I’d hazard, too, that some authorial and/or editorial pruning would have made this a stronger, more streamlined volume. New collections (for each their third) by three Irish poets, each with
its own voice, its own way of wrestling with the language, its own
decisive view of the world. One of my pleasures in reading them was the
sense each one gave of the ways in which poetry can engage immediately
or indirectly with public facts, as well as with the private forces (of
feeling, intelligence, talent, sense of form, love of language, and so
on) which determine its expression. Each volume, so, is political in one
way or another, embodying (as each poet struggles privately with the
language) some decisive attitude to larger and smaller aspects of Irish
life as it is right now, and as it has been in our recent past. Between
them they suggest the instructive, positively agitating intersection
between poetry and its cultural contexts.
(also reviewed: Invitation to a Sacrifice by Dave Lordan) Short review by Des Kenny on Galway Bay FM's Keith Finnegan Show April 2010: "Kevin has been a terrific addition to the literary scene here in Galway. He indeed establishes himself as one of the foremost poets in the West of Ireland with 'Frightening New Furniture'. A wonderful collection. " http://www.galwaynews.ie/podcasts/Keith-Finnegan-Show |
