Reviews/Articles
Click the following links
to read individual reviews:
Poetry.org | The
Galway Advertiser | Magma
| Poetry London | Vallum
Contemporary Poetry | The
Canadian Review of Books | Todd
Swift's Blog | Books Ireland
| Littoral Magazine | The
Red Banner | The Black Mountain Review
Review
of The Boy With No Face in Poetry.org,
June 2005
BY DONNA POTTS
On the back cover of his first published
collection of poetry, The Boy with No Face, Kevin
Higgins is lauded for his potential to become "Ireland's
contemporary answer to Larkin." And his satiric,
self-deprecating, stylistically spare poems do invite
the comparison. The book's opening poem, "Confetti,"
dispenses with portraying a life in all its fullness
as "too much, too much," favouring a minimalist
examination of "bits and pieces" reminiscent
of Larkin's response, some five decades earlier, to
a young lady's photograph album: "too much confectionery,
too rich, I choke on such nutritious images."
Higgins's "Letter to a Friend about Girls"
is openly acknowledged to be "after Larkin,"
and its confessions of teenage ineptness with the
opposite sex are written with the same grim outsider's
perspective on ostensibly worldly, sexualized insiders
as Larkin's "Reasons for Attendance" and
"High Windows."
Yet it is not enough to leave him languishing
in Larkin's shadow. He's funny in a way that Larkin
rarely was, aside from perhaps the grim humor of baby
Easter chicks mauled to death in "Take One Home
for the Kiddies" or his wry advice for the young
that opens, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad..."
Early in the collection, Higgins riffs off of his
self-deprecating title as he contemplates leaving
a steady job behind in exchange for the more economically
and psychologically uncertain life of the poet: "You'll
visit your mother more and more often, / become what
the girls at the office / call "the Norman Bates
sort." Larkin once grimly described his himself
as an "indigestible sterility," but the
description certainly evokes pathos rather than laughter.
Higgins's descriptions invite laughter from beginning
to end, as he adroitly personalizes, in the concluding
lines, the metaphor of losing face: "the smirk
has slipped, sunny Jim. / The face on the floor is
definitely yours."
Higgins approaches the subject of Irish
national identity with the same good humour and honesty
that he tackles his own, as in "I Am Ireland."
Whereas poets like Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, and
Padraig Pearse (Higgins's inspiration for his poem's
form), have been compelled to approach it with an
unwavering reverence that would be unthinkable (especially
lately) in American or British poetry, Higgins instinctively
recognizes the need to temper this vision, providing
a satiric twist to Joyce's description of Ireland
as a culture of death and paralysis: in one poem,
Ireland's posthumous homage to William Joyce (whose
radio broadcasts as "Lord Haw Haw" for the
Nazis during WWII resulted in his execution by the
English for treason) is emblematized by Mary Robinson
posing with his skeleton; in another, an alcoholic
Shop Street Crooner's devotion to this or that dead
hero, who "fought for Ireland ... mice ... squeaking
in his prison cell" is certainly viewed as part
and parcel of a personal failure to embrace life.
In poems such as "Café
Du Journal" (a Galway coffee shop) and "A
real Galwegian," Higgins's meticulous observations
of Galway life provide not just local color, but a
complex register of the changing surface of a newly
affluent Ireland, for which the tide of immigration
has only recently reversed, and new technologies have
taken their toll (Ireland is now the most expensive
country in Europe, with the highest rate of mobile
phone use and one of the five most expensive shopping
districts in the world). His take on international
affairs is appropriately absurdist, even surreal,
as in "Talking with the Cat About World Domination
the Day George W. Bush Almost Choked on a Pretzel."
Higgins's description of the scalpel-wielding
satirist is his poem "The Satirist" is likewise
an apt description of his own approach, as he takes
on everyone from egotistical lyric poets to reinvented
local experts, from has-been socialists to capitalists
to those who lack all conviction, from cowardly lovers
to libertines:
... his mask slipping just a little,
they seem him briefly as he really is:
coming with a warrant, all their names on it.
If Higgins's poetry is Larkinesque,
it is equally possessed of a Whitmanesque breadth
of vision and a Dickinsonian depth, culminating in
a voice - funny, incisive, and genuinely modest -
entirely his own.
© poetry.org, 2005
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."
Review of The
Boy With No Face in Magma,
Summer 2005
BY ANDREW NEILSON
At times he can come across as a slightly
more mordant, Irish Roddy Lumsden. His best work is
short, snappy and satirical, such as Café Du
Journal. But Higgins is more politically engaged --
as in The Hidden Hand, inspired by Nigel Lawson's
famous quote on the free market... Kevin Higgins is
brimful of ideas and makes real efforts to entertain
his readers at all times... The Boy With No Face is
certainly a charismatic performance.
I don't normally comment on a collection's
packaging, but someone is putting the work in and
I was particularly impressed with the presentation
of The Boy With No Face. When I think of Irish poetry
publishers I usually get to Gallery Press and no further,
but Salmon Poetry, based in County Clare, are just
as well established and clearly producing excellent-looking
books.
Henry
Shukman, Poetry London, Summer 2005
"There's a hard-boiled grittiness here - he is
a kind of anti-celebrant. His bathos can be refreshing,
and the anger lurking just beneath the surface (in
poems such as 'A Brief History of Those Who Made Their
Point Politely And Then Went Home') invigorating."
Review
by Kimberly Burwick in Vallum
Contemporary Poetry (Montreal, Canada)
Upon entering Kevin Higgins' debut collection of poems, The Boy With No Face, one immediately hears echoes of Andre Breton's famous words,
Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future.
Higgins' work, like Breton's, depends upon such black humour: it is the sole mechanism by which Higgins' poems are driven forward.
To accept the dark and droll world of The Boy With No Face, one must trust that the speaker is using humour not sheepishly but skillfully, as a way of gaining access into an international web of political and literary misfits and idols. What Higgins does in his poems is invoke names (Irish politicians, dissenters, playwrights and dancers; American presidents, poets, filmmakers and economists) as a way of leveling the playing field, or more specifically, as a way of knitting together his fractured, postmodern troupe of actors, each of whom has a dramatic presence in the book. Thus, if one is intent upon understanding the real humour and workmanship of The Boy With No Face, one must be willing to explore each reference (or evoked name) carefully, and create a map of the satirical world of the poems.
Higgins' poem 'I Am Ireland? is, in a sense, the raison d'etre of the The Boy With No Face. It should be noted that this poem is dedicated to the poet Padraic Pearse, the executed commander-in-chief of the Irish rebel forces in the Easter Rebellion of 1916. Higgins begins this minimalist sequence with:
I am Ireland:
I am the Love-child of Brian Keenan and John Waters.
I drive Lebanese terrorists and Sinead O'Connor bonkers.
I will go on forever.
When we envision this ghostly hybrid (the love-child of Brian Keenan, the Irish hostage held in Lebanon over four years, and the Irish journalist who fathered a child with Sinead O'Connor) we see the level of fusion and black humour that Higgins is going for in The Boy With No Face. As readers, we are able to go with these associations because of the language used, the simple diction and the end-stopped line. Yet Higgins does not stop there. He goes on in the poem to name himself as the progeny of Enya and Lord of the Dance Michael Flatley, Frank McCourt and his brother, The X Factor's Louis Walsh and Milli Vanilli. By the time we reach the final line -- I keep a hyena in my front garden and I am ready! -- we see the speaker defending the fantastic world he created.
There are darker poems in this collection that favour bleakness over pure humour, poems like 'In The Cold Light of Day.' This poem begins in the same simple diction -- 'When you examine the scum in your favorite mug' -- and leads us straight into the speaker's quiet fascination with the comedy and drama of despair. This gritty tone is one of Higgins' strengths, the dark and grimy whine free of pretty metaphors and ear-pleasing assonance.
In fact, most of Higgins' poems work by slinging pithy phrases and shaping them into a political context. In 'Talking With the Cat About World Domination the Day George W. Bush Almost Choked on a Pretzel,' what works its way into the poem is a kind of dramatic monologue, the voice outfitted with sassy one-liners such as -- 'time to deliver / for me and you, Puss. Our battle-cry??'. The nonsensical in The Boy With No Face works because Higgins' sense of dark humour does not falter; if anything, it graduates to the steadfast witnessing of an unnatural world.
Kimberly Burwick's first collection
of poems, Has No Kinsmen, is forthcoming in Summer
2005 with Red Hen Press. Her work has appeared in
Fence, The Florida Review, Hayden Ferry Review, Barrow
Street, River City, Poetry Wales, The Paris/Atlantic
and Nthposition. She is an adjunct instructor at the
University of Connecticut.
Review of
The Boy With No Face by Chris Jennings, Books In Canada:
The Canadian Review of Books July 2005
Kevin Higgins might be glad to have
published his first book, The Boy With No Face,
in 2005. Otherwise, his dense list of international
publishing credits might have qualified him for inclusion
in The New Irish Poets - as good as he is at what
he does, his style would be an odd fit in Guinness's
anthology. It's loose, conversational, idiomatic,
and mordant qualities that, when judged by the standards
of TNIP [The New Irish Poets, Bloodaxe, 2004], might
produce responses like the one the speaker of Higgins's
"In the Cold Light of Day" receives: "Your
work could be much more technically crisp."
He is more sharp than crisp and more
successful satirically than lyrically. "Knives"
offers a fairly concise insight into Higgins's poetic
persona: "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." Many
poems, especially early in the book, address an unidentified
"you" ("you seem to have found yourself";
"[y]our girlfriend will dump you"; "[w]hen
you examine the scum in your favorite mug").
When "I" appears, it's often
in caricatured imitation: "I am Frank McCourt's
next book / and, even worse, I'm his brother."
It's the privilege of the satirist to point out others'
flaws, and the unspecified second person bridges the
gap between an individual and a particular flawed
type. Many of Higgins's short sketches therefore skewer
their subject in a representative moment. "The
Libertine" reduces its portrait to a couplet:
"Plagued with infections, vice has its price,
/ he just passes them on, like good advice."
Several poems draw on the mirror as trope: "Look
in the mirror! / The smirk has slipped, Sunny Jim.
/ The face on the floor is definitely yours."
This borders on self-reflexive satire, as though "you"
were a thin reflection of "I". Linked together
by common vices, the early poems seem to scrutinize
fragmentary facets of a larger self.
The narrative of "The Boy with
No Face" "abandoned, burned while saving
a friend, turning to inhalants at eleven" succeeds
because Higgins's tempo and repetition convey anger
better than sympathy: "I'm the boy with no face.
/ I wander at night, stand around the fires that blaze
in the dead zones / at the stopped heart of this city.
Casual acquaintances. / Sniff glue and petrol, learn
to shoot up." "Blackhole" seeds anaphoric
subordinate clauses within anaphoric sentences: "This
is the place where council estates come complete /
with built in big dogs and gunshots, where a dull
sun bakes the furnace air / as tower-block windows
give that careless look / that only tranquilised eyes
can throw". The poem has a venom to its urban
vision that conjures a bitter, articulate speaker.
There's very little in Guinness's anthology that explores
this style, and it's the standard by which Higgins's
work should be measured as he moves forward.
In Brief:
Three Good Books Of Poetry From 2005 by Todd Swift
I am one of those who believes that
2005 was a very good year for all sorts of poetry
published in the UK and Ireland - just look at the
T.S. Eliot Prize short-list - hardly a dud there,
and arguably six books that could win without much
fuss over any injustice or cronyism. I'd say which
book I want to win, but a handful of the poets up
for it are, admittedly, friends of mine - and, in
fact, I am torn a little.
It does seem odd that Hill's Comus
was not selected, along with a few other collections,
that might easily have slipped in for notice, but,
since this was a bumper year, did not.
Three collections of poetry which I
very much enjoyed, and did not, perhaps, receive the
accolades or gongs they deserved, include two from
Bloodaxe, and one from the smaller Irish press Salmon.
Sally Read gave us her debut collection
early in the year. The Point Of Splitting (Bloodaxe)
from its edgy title to disturbing cover onwards, is
a sexy, dark and actually at times twisted exploration
of eros and thanatos, with stops along the way to
deal with issues such as nursing, men teaching women
to load guns, and the joys of anal sex. Sensationalism
aside, what struck me was the ability to shape and
control the competing claims of lyricism, form, wit,
and a strong, even unique, visual sense. Poems like
Soldier ("Exhausted, you trace my bare arse with one
idle hand") or the haunting and even unforgettable
"Instruction" are very good. Read is on my list of
the best new poets now emerging in the UK, and I very
much look forward to her next book.
I have known the work of Kevin Higgins
since meeting him briefly in New York City three or
four years ago, at a poetry launch. His reading at
Bob Holman's Bowery Club impressed me - he was not
like other contemporary Irish poets - more louche,
more savage in his wit, with less need to toe a party-line
(even though political in concern at times) - in short,
more in the line of Jonathan Swift than Yeats and
heirs (who are often a little too concerned with the
sublime decorum of things). So, yes, Higgins was funny,
and bold. He also writes a sort of poem that no one
else does, currently. To my ear, that makes him an
original - after all, the hardest thing for a poet
to do is actually sound as unique as each person thinks
themselves to be. Let me be clear on this - Higgins
has forsaken a direct interest in form, or the lyric,
to stake out territory that is far more bleak, blunt
and necessary - he speaks as an angry man at the turn
of a new century, one who refuses to be bought or
sold, but knows the value of words that aren't simply
being used for display, disguise - he is a sort of
master of expressing disgust, and praising the shabby.
Just as Read takes me in to worlds
no poet has before (bedrooms where men and women openly
admit to their interest in weapons; rooms where nurses
pack the dead away with calm and indifference) Higgins
actually invents a world as much his as Graham Greene's
was to him: a compromised, dusty edge of Galway, suddenly
made shiny and new by Globalism; Higgins is the voice
of discontent, and his next collection, when he shifts
in to a more interior key, after mapping the outer
edges of a world being transformed utterly, will be
a revelation, I suspect. At any rate, no other younger
Irish poet has written so many visually arresting
and witty poems about the New Ireland as can be found
in Higgins' The Boy With No Face.
Esther Morgan, whose work I have been
pleased to publish at nthposition.com
has produced a very fine second collection, The Silence
Living In Houses (cover pictured above), out from
Bloodaxe. A poem like "Balancing Act" presents her
lucid, elegant and disturbing voice precisely: "The
blood tilts inside her head: / in a continuous present
/ a girl is carrying a tumbler".
I found poems like "Small-boned" and
"Half Sister" chilling, eerie, haunting - of course,
the book takes as one of its aspects the Gothic theme
of houses haunted - by former acts, by present memories.
This is a difficult sort of trope to make new, and
Morgan does this. Indeed, the opening section of the
book, "The House Of" is a sustained, small-boned triumph,
and is especially recommended. Once again, Morgan,
like Read and Higgins, stakes much on a strong visual
offering to the reader. At the end of "Endurance"
the house as ship is figured so: "the house rigged
in ice and going down".
As Morgan says "I worry at my argument
of bone" - and she does so with terrible care, alerting
the reader to the sinking and the rising spirits that
haunt each dwelling place, whether that be a home,
or a poem. Morgan's third collection, when it comes,
will almost certainly establish her, once and for
all (as if more than this book was needed) as one
of the best younger poets now writing in the British
isles. http://toddswift.blogspot.com/
Books
Ireland, January-February 2006
Review by Rory Brennan
The changes in what a poem can be and
do over half a century are shown in Kevin Higgins'
new work. At the start a poem was almost a sacrosanct
object with aspirations to Flaubertian perfectionism,
an object d?art seeking a glass case. Now a poem can
be waved around like a banner and screamed from the
rooftops like Ginsberg's Howl, itself a poem
that has taken five decades to win the day -- or at
least win the light of day. Poems are no longer just
private acts between consenting readers and writers,
they are licensed to be flaunted and declaimed in
the marketplace, which after all is where they started
as chants, prayers, war cries, stories tied together
by rhyme. Higgins reads his work in Europe and the
US and lists seventy or so outlets where he has been
published. This is poetry to be read aloud rather
than crafted verse for readers in armchairs. Hence
it has a good deal of the shock and punch of the stand-up
comic, and I intend that as high praise. One of Higgins?
themes is the preciousness of the poem as literary
artefact, for example the love lyric. No, it's not
about love, it's about the poet boasting he can still
find someone to have sex with. He parodies the classic
"I am Ireland" with "I am the lovechild
of Brian Keenan and John Waters" or "I am
Enya'?s next album". A customer chatting up a
Czech waitress "only wants her Sudetenland".
Capitalism gets a proper bashing here but will somehow
survive: "I believe in Milton Friedman and he
believes in me". What makes Higgins' work so
fresh is that the objects of his wrath are both contemporary
and powerful. He does not kick people when they are
down, like the fake satirist, or flog dead horses
for a comfortable audience. His targets are doing
damage now and he's out to get them. He is the boy
in the title poem, the faceless one in the pit of
St Petersburg, the perennial loser in all wars of
ideology. It would all lacerate your heart. No, Higgins
is not Swift but I still hope they'll put up a plaque
to him in Galway Cathedral -- or spray-paint one of
his poems on a wall, which would probably please him
more.
Littoral
Magazine (UK)
Review by Adrian Green
It has been suggested that Kevin Higgins
could turn out to be Ireland's contemporary answer
to Larkin, but surely Larkin never had the lightness
of touch to penetrate the dark corners of humanity
with such sharp-witted humour that the reader is smiling
and wincing with the pain of it at the same time?
The relationship is that of The Satirist with
his audience
"...his mask slipping just a little,
they see him briefly as he really is:
coming with a warrant, all their names on it.
But this satirist is a poet. In The
Red Shoes he declares "Poetry, I suppose, is my
dance." His subjects are politics, relationships,
Irish history -- 21st century life really, and he
is always likely to catch the reader unawares with
unexpected but sharply observed comment. No-one is
exempt from his satire and the names he invokes bear
following up -- they are not included simply for decoration.
The tone varies from the sardonic
"quote" and aside in To Certain Lyric Poets
to the surrealist fantasy of I am Ireland.
Of the lyric poet, he writes
"Even, 'her hair on the pillow
like freshly fallen snow',
is there to let us know
he still gets laid,
although in this case,
she probably passed
through Robert Graves's hands first"
In I am Ireland, he writes
"Great my glory:
I am Enya's next album
and Michael Flatley's other testicle rolled into one."
Even here, though, the humour is not
without bite -- the poem is subtitled "after Pádraic
Pearse", poet and leader of the Easter Rebellion in
1916. There is a strong thread of political and historical
awareness throughout the collection, but also a bleak
domesticity in the descriptions of a disintegrating
relationship as in The Slow Revenge:
"Already wearing the lines of the coming
decline,
you'll soon be whinging for wedding bells,
because on clear nights you're wide awake
with the knowledge, that the world gets
its slow revenge on single men
in upstairs flats:..."
The poems are deceptive. They read
easily, without apparent obscurity, so it is no surprise
that the author is an accomplished and popular performer
of his own work, but there is always that extra seam
to be mined on re-reading. This is one of the most
satisfying first collections I have read in several
years.
Red Banner
issue 24
"Knifeman" -- Review by Tomás Mac
Síomóin
For Kevin Higgins, words mean, are
serious: as serious as a brandished knife. In The
Boy With No Face, his first collection, the poem
'Knives' (p 15) sets the tone:
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.
There are knives and knives in it!
Higgins's scalpels, stilettos, daggers, kitchen knives,
Swiss Army knives, Stanley knives, carving knives,
meat cleavers, machetes (etymological cousin of the
hatchet) etc., etc. -- irony, parody, satire, sarcasm,
black humour and a scathing wit (sometimes at his
own, the poet's, expense) -- hack, stab, cut, thrust,
slice and peel away layers of ideological sludge and
officially approved (if not promoted) gormlessness
to lay bare the desolate inner and outer landscapes
of these, our postmodern post-nearly-every-goddamn-thing
times. In 'The Satirist' (p 25), the poet selects
a scalpel from this impressive cutlery collection
as he inadvertently, mar dhea, lets slip the aim of
his poetic mission:
Society may flash its knickers
at him,
but flowers or love songs, he will not bring them.
Instead the audience ripples with nervous laughter
as, from his jacket, he takes a scalpel.
And, his mask slipping just a little,
they see him briefly as he really is:
coming with a warrant, all their names on it.
From this we gather that Higgins's
knives are definitely not at the service of the gentle
art of navel gazing, popular with certain officially
accredited and much applauded poets who, whenever
and whatever they say, always manage to say nothing.
The pretty-pretty self-glorifying products of this
activity are lampooned in 'To Certain Lyric Poets'
(p 18):
He's been known
to agonise for hours
over a single word
and each one of them
is precisely meant
because, to him,
words are beautiful things,
flowers to be arranged
around an altar to his ego.
One of the objects of Higgins's knifings
is our much revered, if not by now sacred, Celtic
Tiger, in whose lair the cultural icons and symbols
of an earlier Ireland have been uprooted, cast on
the midden of history, and replaced. Thus in 'I am
Ireland' (p 19), a take-off of Pearse's 'Mise ?ire',
the reality of the current assimilation of Irish popular
culture to the all-prevailing Anglo-American consumerist
norms is accompanied by the adoption of correspondingly
new cultural icons:
I am Ireland:
I am the love child of Brian Keenan and John Waters.
I drive Lebanese terrorists and Sin?ad O'Connor bonkers.
I will go on forever.
Great my glory
I am Enya's next album
and Michael Flatley's other testicle rolled into one.
Great is my
shame:
I am Frank McCourt's next book
and, even worse, I'm his brother.
Another side of the neoliberal coin
is represented by the collateral misery of Russia's
traumatic lurch from Soviet state capitalism to the
anarchic chaos of the free market. The poem which
lends itself to the title of the collection (p 66)
deals with the vicissitudes of a homeless eleven-year-old
living rough in freezing St Petersburg, the former
Leningrad. Parts of his lifestyle are not unknown
in the heartlands of global capital, nor within a
thousand miles of inner-city Dublin, for that matter:
I live in the
damp basements and freezing cellars of humanity
scuttled away under St. Petersburg.
Pulverised walls eaten with mould threaten in on my
space,
down among the stagnant smells, the rubbish and the
rats,
on the bed I makeshifted from old pieces of cardboard.
I'm the boy
with no face.
I wander at night, stand around the fires that blaze
in the dead zones
at the stopped heart of this city. Casual acquaintances
Sniff glue and petrol, learn to shoot up.
This is the best of all possible worlds,
'a rich man's world' as the Abba song had it, where
"the hidden hand of the free market" (in a quote attributed
to Britain's former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel
Lawson) is what conducts the whole shebang ('The Hidden
Hand', p 35):
I sometimes
work in mysterious ways; can
make a million bucks vanish
just like that. I made Joseph Kennedy rich,
tossed Robert Maxwell off his yacht,
I am the be all, the end all; the hidden hand
which makes you dance.
All of this is 'political', of course.
Higgins's accurate identification of warts on the
somewhat less than fair face of our reality puts his
poetry outside the canon of certain ivory-tower academics
for whom analysis of the text itself is all, and for
whom context is nothing, if not anathema. Art mixed
with politics? The sublime with the vulgar! C'mon,
you've got to be joking! I refer such text-only junkies -- they
exist: I've met one or two -- to the words of Terry Eagleton
(Literary Theory ? An Introduction, p 194-5): "There
is, in fact, no need to drag politics into literary
theory... For any body of theory concerned with human
meaning, value, language, feeling and experience will
inevitably engage with broader, deeper beliefs about
the nature of human individuals and societies, problems
of power and sexuality, interpretations of past history,
versions of the present and hopes for the future."
Mutatis mutandis, this consideration cannot
but apply with equal force to the very object of literary
theorising, literature itself, poetry... Try to fully
understand the poetry of Pablo Neruda, W H Auden,
Miguel Hernandez, Ernesto Cardenal, Somhairle Mac
Ghill-Eain, Stephen Spender, Rafael Alberti, Allan
Ginsberg, Hugh MacDiarmid etc., etc. -- all of whom,
like Kevin Higgins, wear (or wore) socialist hearts
on their poetic sleeves -- without taking their political
stance on matters that concern us all into account!
See how far that will get you! With
the collapse of the Soviet bloc, more than the Berlin
Wall tumbled down. For with it fell -- irrationally,
unjustifiably, one may say -- the street credibility
of socialism's ideological base. Unlike the aforementioned
poetic lefties (all dead now with the exception of
Cardenal) Kevin Higgins -- and all of us -- inhabit
that bleak Lyotardian universe from which the great
Illustration narratives -- especially Marxism -- with
all their hopes, utopian dreams and protagonists appear
to have been banished, like pookas from the Irish
countryside, for ever. Thence, in 'The Fás
Man Cometh' (p 36):
In my new position
as an apparatchik of the new Irish Order...
Old mind-sets must be set aside.
Labour in Irish History? I've left it behind.
And as for The Internationale?
I've managed to forget every last word.
The rout of the political left and
its failure to recover and renew the vitality of its
programme is conveyed by the pessimistic title of
the poem 'The Bankrupt Years' (p 64) and its graphic
images of loss:
The streets
have been cleared of unmanned barricades
and we are left with only empty gestures to be made.
The curtain
is raised over a vacant stage
upon which no more great parts are played...
There are no
pieces to be put back in place again,
only the ashes of history falling through fingers.
Yeats's "receding wave" at least left
the consolation of the music of pebbles rattling on
the shore. The empty verbiage of global capitalism's
organic intellectuals ('intellectual' in its loosest
possible sense), garrulous disc jockeys and gobshite
journalists, smarmy chat-show hosts and airhead personalities,
all enthusiastically committed to the continuous propagation
of mindlessness, offers no grounds for consolation
of any sort:
A blanket of blind fog gives camouflage
to the blatant blather of knaves and bunkum from numbskulls.
Their minds are so open that nothing stays there.
The all-pervasiveness of such vacuity
totally alienates the poet from a status quo whose
continuity is conditional upon mindlessness: "I'm
a wrong thing wandered into an erroneous context",
he says ('Else', p 39)... He also senses the political
danger inherent to a situation where people are systematically
educated and manipulated to not-think, to not-ask
the questions that cry out to be asked. Thence, emerging
from the desolate urban wasteland of 'Blackhole' (p
67), Yeats's "rough beast" appears again and slouches
towards Bethlehem, Belfast, Brussels, Boston, Bermondsey
or wherever to be born:
This is the place where young men
come out
into the shadows behind the cemetery walls
to paint swastikas on headstones
and play football with skulls
That, with the media-orchestrated disappearance
of Illustration (i.e. 'progressive') values, the sinister
germ of totalitarianism may be harboured in the mediocre
and unlikely bodies of certain neighbourhood acquaintances
is the message of 'Desperate Weather' (p 33). A future
'strong' leader could just as well be called An Taoiseach
as Der F?hrer, Il Duce or El Caudillo. Time ripens
for the appearance of such an individual when the
lack of political savvy allows only the most simplistic
solutions for complex problems to be contemplated
('The Leader', p 32):
He's the sort of man who hasn't
read
Mein Kampf just yet. But he'll be here,
like the old man buying The Racing Post
who growls about 'invaders' or the skinhead
with the petrol bomb whose hour is striking now.
A sort of Spenglerian Untergang
des Abendlands mood imposed on the youthful optimism
of what was once thought to be the ?bergang des Morgenlands,
a fin de si?cle weariness, seems to vitiate the poet's
will to struggle against the dull conformity to a
world where "Flowers shrink and cower, / as their
shades dull to blend / with the sameness all around"
('Lethargy', p 69).
All that seems to be left is to
throw a shrug of the shoulders
to the trend of the times and to trudge,
through this desolate cackle, on out of my age.
['The Bankrupt Years']
Does this mean surrender to a status
quo? Does "trudge... on out of my age" signify the poet's
acceptance of the futility of resistance to the dominant
forces of the age? Or simply his turning away in distaste
from the age's more egregious banalities? His obvious
contempt for those (almost) closet radicals who figure
in 'A Brief History of Those Who Made Their Point
Politely And Then Went Home' (p 37, previously published
in Red Banner 14), and the corresponding implication
of his own, the poet's activism, weights the evidence
in favour of the latter interpretation:
On this day
of tear-gas in Seoul
and windows broken at Dickins & Jones,
I can't help wondering why a history
of those who made their point politely
and then went home, has never been written.
Those who,
in the heat of the moment,
never dislodged a policeman's helmet,
never blocked the traffic or held the country to ransom.
Someone should ask them: "Was it all worth it?"
All those proud
men and women, who never
had the National Guard sent in against them;
who left everything exactly as they found it,
without adding as much as a scratch to the paintwork;
who no-one bothered asking: "Are you or have you ever
been?"
because we all knew damn well they never ever were.
What constitutes good poetry these
days, then, when 'everything and anything goes' and
when the recognition that 'one man's meat is another
man's poison' is well-nigh universal? Formulation
of objective criteria related thereto, valid for all
places and times, is an impossible and futile task.
All one can say without fear of contradiction is that
the function of poetry is to delight. In this regard,
The Boy With No Face is a work of rare distinction.
A book to get your hands on, read with pleasure... and
reread. For Kevin Higgins has the rare knack of finding
words and images that fit and illuminate the affective
temper of these, our metanarrative-free times. For
all of that, his poems are conceived in a spirit of
ironic playfulness, a scrupulous avoidance of what
he himself has called "the sort of po-faced over-earnestness
which so often plagues politically engaged poetry"
('Mentioning the war', Red Banner 16).
Christopher Caudwell -- who didn't 'make
his point politely' (an International Brigadier, he
was killed in action in Madrid in 1937) -- suggested
that "Poetry soaks external reality -- nature and society -- with
emotional significance. This significance, because
it gives the organism an appetitive interest in external
reality, enables the organism to deal with it more
resolutely..." (Illusion and Reality, p 241).
More resolutely? Maybe! Maybe not! Kevin Higgins himself
has mentioned "the powerlessness of poetry in the
face of the onward march of politics and war" ('Mentioning
the war'). Poetry, like music, does not -- nor can it -- provide
solutions for political problems. By so doing, it
would cease to be poetry. If literature, especially
poetry, has any clear function, it is to loose language
from its cosy clich?-ridden cohabitation with 'reality'
and, hopefully, heighten emotional response to whatever
subject it deals with in the process. Gifted poetic
talents like Kevin Higgins rescue language from the
"blatant blather of knaves" in which it is immured,
and harness its vitality so as to tell it like it
really is. It is for all of us, poets included, to
find words to tell it like it should be -- and work to
make it so.
-- from Red Banner issue 24
PO Box 6587, Dublin 6
red_banner@yahoo.com
Kevin Higgins, The Boy with No Face
Reviewed by Michael S. Begnal for The Black Mountain Review
There is no way that this review can be objective. It is well known that Kevin Higgins and I edited The Burning Bush literary magazine together for the first four of its eleven issues, and that we occasionally found ourselves at odds after he resigned from the magazine (back in the year 2000). The point of our dissension was expressed through the age-old form v. content argument. Higgins had rediscovered a dormant Marxism, and for a while he seemed to be arguing that a political message should be the primary concern of poetry. I, conversely, was accused of being an apolitical aesthete who promulgated 'art for art's sake'. Both of these perceptions turned out to be limited and ultimately inaccurate, notwithstanding the invective of some of the articles that were published at the time.
I say all this not so much to set the record straight about myself - I've already done that quite sufficiently elsewhere - but to point out that I come at The Boy with No Face (Higgins' first collection) with a critical eye and a certain amount of experience battling the author in writing. No small thing, this. I once heard another poet refer to the act of 'doing a Kevin Higgins' - by which he meant attacking someone in an article or review with savage excess. But that's not what I'm going to do here, because I think that Higgins' position has evolved from the rottweiler mode of the early 00s, and, more apropos of this review, the collection is really quite good.
So let us turn to the book itself. When I first encountered Higgins back in 1997, I suppose I had the impression that he was something of a decadent; at times he seemed almost Baudelairean in his approach. Traces of this survive, in poems like "No More Tears", "Absent without Leave" ("The girl in the plaid school-skirt...") or in the two-line "The Libertine" ("Plagued with infections, vice has its price,/he just passes them on, like good advice"). The underbelly of old Galway is neatly portrayed in "To Hell and Back Again": ...or, better still, not to bother
leaving your filthy flat all day at all,
but, when the last ray of sun has, finally, gone away,
to shamble down to the kebab house
for a pickled onion and a portion of chips
because you don't have the cash
to use the brothel around the back...
Darkness and alienation do seem to suit Higgins just fine, and phrases like "dimly lit rooms", "back-street hatch" and "droop low in dejection" occur throughout.
Equally to the fore, though, are the political poems, implying a social consciousness and involvement. Higgins has a real talent for satire and humour, and this is what sets him apart from many who attempt the genre. There is no propaganda or the lumpen sloganeering of a lesser-grade political poet. Witness "A Brief History of Those Who Made Their Point Politely and Then Went Home" (one of the best poems in the collection):
On this day of tear gas in Seoul
and windows broken at Dickins & Jones,
I can't help wondering why a history
of those, who made their point politely
and then went home, has never been written....
"The FÁS Man Cometh" is a dissection of "an apparatchik of the New Irish Order", while "The Leader" identifies a certain type of fascist that the author implies is latent in Irish society. One of the most incisive of the satires is "President Robinson Pays Homage to Lord Haw Haw", a biting attack on the lazy liberal Southern establishment via the figures of Mary Robinson and the exceptionable Paul Durcan. Occasionally, it seems to me that Higgins' satire can become a little too caustic when loosed upon private individuals - really funny, but a bit cruel too (perhaps Catullus is the precedent here). There are, however, offerings of an apologia of this in "The Satirist", and in "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.
While there is a definite leftward viewpoint articulated in the political poems, there are no easy answers. "No Such Republic" declares, "Socialism, like the buses, is running late", while in "The Bankrupt Years" the speaker appears resigned and declares that he will "trudge,/through this desolate cackle, on out of my age". The poem "Confetti", placed in the important position of collection opener, actually offers something of a postmodern strategy -- metaphorically, if not in actual form -- which would raise the hackles of any Terry Eagleton follower. All of this must put Higgins at odds with some of the socialist poets he has formerly been associated with, and yet The Boy with No Face outpaces them poetically by a not inconsiderable distance.
A third aspect to this collection has Higgins in the role of, as cover blurb says, "Ireland's contemporary answer to Larkin". That is, he writes about everyday things in accessible language, with a degree of mordancy . "Families and How to Survive Them" is similar in tone to Larkin's "This Be the Verse", and given that another piece is written "after Philip Larkin" it struck me that maybe Higgins is wearing this influence a little too conspicuously on his sleeve. On the other hand I thought I could also see traces of the American poet Frank O'Hara, who treated the quotidian somewhat more imaginatively than Larkin. "January" is a poem which shows Higgins at his best in this mode:
...As we watch our breath drift
across the kitchen, central heating
is a luxury as distant as trays
of oysters at the Galway Races.
The year struggles to its feet,
like a lamb stranded in deep snow...
There are probably a couple other minor flaws in this collection -- the twee "The Red Shoes" seems out of place in the oeuvre of a cynic like Higgins, wincingly stretching a metaphor of poetry as ballet dance. But such jangling moments are far fewer than in many first collections. Whatever about that, and whatever one thinks of Higgins' critical tactics or his ambiguous Marxism, he is an extremely good writer and a unique voice in contemporary Irish poetry. The Boy with No Face pulls off the interesting feat of inhabiting several different genres at once, while not being limited by any one of them. |
