Song of Songs 2.0

By: Kevin Higgins

€14.00

“Ireland’s accomplished political poet and satirist Kevin Higgins”, Diarmaid Ferriter, The Irish Times “I read this twice. Now, will make a coffee and read it again.” Gene Kerrigan of The Sunday Independent “The satirist trades balance for excess, overstatement and savagery, uncovering the hidden dissonances of the social ...

ISBN	978-1-910669-84-6
Pub Date	Monday, April 24, 2017
Cover Image	Mark Jameson
Page Count	166
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“Ireland’s accomplished political poet and satirist Kevin Higgins”,

Diarmaid Ferriter, The Irish Times

“I read this twice. Now, will make a coffee and read it again.”

Gene Kerrigan of The Sunday Independent

“The satirist trades balance for excess, overstatement and savagery, uncovering the hidden dissonances of the social process. Prominent among the younger poets to have set themselves this challenge is Kevin Higgins… Satire is a form of war by other means, and… Higgins shows himself an enthusiastic (verbal) combatant.”

David Wheatley

“Likely the most widely read living poet in Ireland.”

The Stinging Fly

“As nasty a man as he is poor as a ‘poet’.”

John McTernan

(former advisor to Tony Blair)

“Good satirical savagery.”

The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800-2000

“Higgins picks apart the human condition, its disappointments

and indulgences, with vigour and acumen.”

Roddy Lumsden

“His contribution to the development of Irish satire is indisputable… Higgins’ poems embody all of the cunning and deviousness of language as it has been manipulated by his many targets... it is clear that Kevin Higgins’ voice and the force of his poetic project are gaining in confidence and authority with each new collection.”

Philip Coleman

“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…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”,

Eamon Grennan, The Irish Times

“It is a profound compliment to the quality of Kevin’s writing that you can disagree with the content and yet find yourself still reading on and appreciating the style. You’d have to say that he is one of the lead poets of his generation in Ireland at this stage.”

Clare Daly T.D.

“Gil Scott Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised as re-told by Victor Meldrew”.

Phil Brown, Eyewear

“Fluent and often as laugh-out-loud funny as Paul Howard's Ross O'Carroll-Kelly.”

John McAuliffe, The Irish Times

“Higgins is a genius, because he does something only great poets do: he writes with a voice that is entirely his own, in a style he has invented, about themes and concerns that now are instantly recognisable as his terrain.”

Todd Swift

“Ireland's sharpest satirist my arse.”

Fergus Finlay

“Ireland's best political poet”

Mike Jenkins, former editor of Poetry Wales

“Brilliant satire.”

Peter Tatchell

“Kevin Higgins writes political poetry of the highest order, telling truth to power with Swiftian savagery and satirical humour, dissecting and denouncing political doublespeak, pretension and hypocrisy.”

Mike Quille, Culture Matters

Kevin Higgins

Kevin Higgins was co-organiser of Over The Edge literary events in Galway for twenty years, from 2003 until his death in 2023. He published six previous full collections of poems: The Boy With No Face (2005), Time Gentlemen, Please (2008), Frightening New Furniture (2010), The Ghost In The Lobby (2014), Sex and Death at Merlin Park Hospital (2019), and Ecstatic (2022), all with Salmon Poetry. His poems also featured in Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010) and in The Hundred Years’ War: modern war poems (Ed Neil Astley, Bloodaxe May 2014). Kevin was satirist-in-residence with the alternative literature website The Bogman’s Cannon from 2015 to 2016. 2016 – The Selected Satires of Kevin Higgins was published by NuaScéalta in 2016. The Minister For Poetry Has Decreed was published by Culture Matters (UK) also in 2016. Song of Songs 2:0: New & Selected Poems was published by Salmon in Spring 2017. Kevin was a highly experienced workshop facilitator and several of his students have gone on to achieve publication success. He facilitated poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre and taught Creative Writing at Galway Technical Institute for fifteen years. Kevin was the Creative Writing Director for the NUI Galway International Summer School and also taught on the NUIG BA Creative Writing Connect programme. His poems have been praised by, among others, Tony Blair’s biographer John Rentoul, Observer columnist Nick Cohen, writer and activist Eamonn McCann, historian Ruth Dudley Edwards, and Sunday Independent columnist Gene Kerrigan; and have been quoted in The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Times (London), Hot Press magazine, The Daily Mirror and on The Vincent Browne Show, and read aloud by Ken Loach at a political meeting in London. He published topical political poems in publications as various as The New European, The Morning Star, Dissent Magazine (USA), Village Magazine (Ireland), & Harry’s Place. The Stinging Fly magazine has described Kevin as “likely the most widely read living poet in Ireland”. One of Kevin’s poems features in A Galway Epiphany, the final instalment of Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series of novels. His work has been broadcast on RTE Radio, Lyric FM, and BBC Radio 4. He was a regular contributor to the podcast Not the Andrew Marr Show, hosted by Crispin Flintoff; its audience posthumously voted Kevin a Labour Hero of 2023. Mentioning the War, a collection of his reviews and essays, was published by Salmon in 2012. His book The Colour Yellow & The Number 19: Negative Thoughts That Helped One Man Mostly Retain His Sanity During 2020 was published in late 2020 by Nuascealta. His extended essay ‘Thrills & Difficulties: Being A Marxist Poet In 21st Century Ireland’ was published in pamphlet form by Beir Bua Press in 2021. Life Itself is published posthumously.

Selfie

“At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”

George Orwell

My hair is the grass

on the local five-a-side pitch

at the end of the worst winter

since nineteen forty seven.

My eyebrows, more

than my personal groomer—

the cat— can handle right now.

My eyes are light blue jellyfish

floating in increasingly

opaque sea-water.

The fuzz up my nose,

and in my ears, that patch

of grass the university groundsman

keeps forgetting to cut.

My ears, two elderly uncles

successfully avoiding each other

at opposite ends of a wedding.

My skin, the well-thumbed book

you picked up in a charity shop,

and never got around to finishing.

In their last exam, my lungs

got fifty three per cent,

so won’t be going to university

unless I give them to medical science.

My belly is one of those small insults

you get away with

because you’ve had Champagne,

but should generally keep

itself to itself.

My penis is a vintage car

one only takes out

every so often.

My knees and ankles are machinery

made almost obsolete

by recent developments.

The crack down the gable wall

has moved and is now

within me.

Manifesto of The Last International: Address To The Men and Women of Waterlooville

with a little help from Darrell Kavanagh & Quincy Lehr

Our movement will be henceforth called

Death to Bruce Forsyth. We will abolish all

immigration controls. Burqas

will be mandatory for supporters

of West Ham United and Millwall.

We will re-appoint Lord Reith

(1889-1971) Director-General of the BBC.

There will be compulsory German lessons

for the unemployed. Sexual congress

between residents of Basingstoke

will be prohibited forthwith. The Church

of England and National Coal Board will be merged.

Public schools will be converted into saunas

for unconsenting homosexuals. Local bus services

will be replaced, as of January 2016, with sedan chairs

carried by ex-members of the newly extinguished

Confederation of British Industry.

The smoking of Slim Panatella cigars

will be compulsory for school children

from year three onwards. Each workday

will begin with the singing

of the collected works of Gary Glitter.

The capital of England will rotate

triennually between Crawley, Havant and Bordeaux.

The new twenty pound note will bear the mugshot

of the late Unity Mitford with tastefully drawn on

gunshot wound. We will declare war,

first on Tibet, then on ourselves.

Exit

for Darrell Kavanagh in his hour of need

There will be no more thunderstorms

sent across the Channel by the French,

no acid rain floating in from Belgium.

Pizza Hut will offer a choice of

Yorkshire Pudding or Yorkshire Pudding.

You’ll spend the next twenty seven bank holidays

dismantling everything you ever bought from IKEA.

The electric shower your plumber,

Pavel, put in last week will be taken out

and you’ll be given the number of a bloke

who’s pure Billericay. Those used to caviar

will have jellied eels forced

down their magnificent throats.

Every fish and chip shop

on the Costa del Sol will in time

be relocated to Ramsgate or Carlisle.

All paving stones laid by the Irish

will be torn up to make work

for blokes who’ve been on the sick

since nineteen seventy six.

Those alleged to be involved in secretly

making spaghetti bolognaise

will be arrested and held

in a detention centre near Dover. Sausage dogs

will be put in rubber dinghies

and pointed in the general direction

of the Fatherland. Neatly sliced

French sticks topped with Pâté

will make way for fried bread

lathered with Marmite.

There’ll be no more of those new

names for coffee your gran

can’t pronounce. The entire royal family

will be shipped back to Bavaria, with the exception

of the Duke of Edinburgh who’ll be given

a one way ticket to Athens. Curry

will no longer by compulsory

after every twelfth pint of Stella,

which itself will only be available

by special permission of the Foreign Office.

We’ll give India back its tea, sit around increasingly

bellicose campfires in our rusting iron helmets,

our tankards overflowing with traditional Norse mead.

Song of Songs 2.0 / Kevin Higgins

Song of Songs 2.0

By: Kevin Higgins

Other Titles from Kevin Higgins

Ecstatic

Frightening New Furniture

Life Itself

Mentioning the War: Essays & Reviews 1999-2011

Sex and Death at Merlin Park Hospital

The Boy with No Face

The Ghost in the Lobby

Time Gentlemen, Please

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