"Kevin Higgins is a master of the grim and bearing it. Higgins could turn out to be Ireland's contemporary answer to Larkin." Books In Canada

"Upfront, delivered in an informal, conversational manner which delights in its own wry black humour, it is the poetry of the urban twenty-first century, casting a sharply critical eye over the condition of contemporary society." Metre

Kevin Higgins was born in London in 1967, and grew up in Galway City. His poetry has appeared widely in literary journals in Ireland, Britain, the United States, Canada, France, Belgium, Finland, Italy & New Zealand. His work also features in the anthologies Short Fuse, Breaking The Skin: New Irish Poetry, 100 Poets Against The War & Irish Writers Against War. He has reviewed poetry for Metre, Books In Canada, Poetry Quarterly Review, Vallum, & Canadian Notes & Queries. He was a founding co-editor of The Burning Bush literary magazine and is the poetry critic of The Galway Advertiser. In April 2003 he won the Poetry Grand Slam at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, and went on to represent Ireland in the European Grand Slam in Paris. He is an accomplished performer of his work and has read at literary festivals in Ireland, Britain, the United States & France.

Knives

It wasn't from the wind I took it:
with a grandad who once threatened
to tie a cat across the hedge,
so that nosy bastard neighbours, as they passed,
would gawk at it instead of in at him;
and a father who often likened
Albert Reynolds' face to a torn slipper;
I come from a long line of men,
who saw words not as decorations
but weapons, knives with which to
cut others down to size.

Confetti

No-one gets to glimpse a finished canvas,
nor views the film in its uncut entirety.
Too much, too much, to lay it all out
across a pure white sheet on a clean spring noon
all in order and accounted for.
Instead it's all bits and pieces.
Hidden here. Filed away there.
Where no-one would think to look.
Appropriate fragments are carefully chosen
and juggled for appropriate pairs of eyes.
There are hints. The occasional chink.
At twilight, perhaps at dawn, in dimly lit rooms.
They fall like confetti to the floor.
Until, some day, you're there again in that hallway,
where solitude casts the blackest of shadows,
and it all comes out, coheres, like a flaw
yawning sharply across a bare space.

A real Galwegian

Because when you watch the woman
sitting next to you writing an e-mail
in what looks like Korean, or find yourself asking
someone called Candy from Saskatchewan
for two bagels with cream-cheese,

it occasionally still hits you; how it's
like the blink of an eyelid since, down this street,
the coffee was rotten, and a night out
just a pint of sad Smithwicks eventually
emerging in a withered hand
from a back-street hatch, a barman telling

a complaining Yank how the lock broken
on that toilet door has been that way
for nearly twenty years, and not
a single shit stolen yet.

Winter in Minnesota

Forty seven next November. He's almost as over
as Hubert Humphrey's White House hopes.
Never imagined he'd have to winter back in Minnesota,
be there standing on his mother's front lawn,
like a distant cousin in a photograph no-one remembers taking.
The Dylan Thomas of Minneapolis; got so caught
up with mythmaking and pool-hall brawls,
twenty five years later he isn't even Garrison Keillor;
will settle for the woman, who'll aid and abet him
through the next bottle of whiskey, and maybe
tend the grass, the daisies when he's done.

Kevin Higgins on Why Humour Matters
BY KERNAN ANDREWS
The Galway Advertiser, Thursday 3rd March, 2005

A DEVILISHLY funny and frank way of looking at Galway and the wider world mark the poetry of Kevin Higgin's first collection 'The Boy With No Face' (Salmon Poetry), launched in Galway last week. Higgins is one of the best known poets in Galway, teaching poetry classes and hosting the Over The Edge: Open Readings each month in the Galway City Library.

In 'President Robinson Pays Homage To Lord Haw Haw, 21 October 1996', he sends up Paul Durcan's lionisations of the former president and portrays her as a political opportunist: "Paying homage to Haw Haw...it taught her the crucial role of the individual in history."

However 'Brief History Of Those Who Made Their Point Politely And Then Went Home' is quite left-wing in its outlook and scorns the political apathy and inaction of those "who never had the National Guard sent in against them; who left everything as they found it/" Such views make Higgins politically hard to pin down. but he sees writing as having a deeper role to play than just being political. "I don't think political orthodoxy works with any form of art", he told me at the launch in the Galway Arts Centre Nun's Island Studio, "I like subversion and turning things on their head and you have to write from what you absolutely believe in."

The Boy With No Face is filled with satiric humour, not only about people who set themselves up on a pedestal, but with witty observations about Galway city. In "Real Galwegian", he recalls 1980s Ireland when a night out "was just a sad pint of Smithwicks, and the barman telling/a complaining Yank how the lock broken/on that toilet door has been that way/for nearly twenty years, and not/a single shit stolen yet."

Poetry too often conjures up images of earnest, dour, loners, pouring angst into self-pitying paeans to themselves. The image is mostly false but unfortunately it has stuck. Higgins however is a welcome relief to that. Humour doesn't get the credit it deserves for the way it makes bearable or comprehensible life's absurdities, and like a good comedian, Higgins wry depiction's achieve this. "Humour is an integral part of what we are - from frivolity to black humour",he says. "If there is no flicker of humour that turns me off. You can say outrageous things through humour". Of course Higgins' interest in language, subversion, satire, and honesty in his point of view comes as no surprise when one reads the autobiographical 'Knives': "I come from a long line of men,/who saw words not as decorations/but weapons, knives with which to cut others down to size." "That's an important poem for me", he says. "The words I quote from my grandfather and father in that poem were things they said. I didn't make them up. In the poem I was investigating where that honesty comes from. I cannot stand pomposity. If you can make someone laugh at your enemies you have won. Pope and Swift could do that and that's what I'm interested in."