Rita Ann Higgins

Ireland Is Changing Mother is Rita Ann Higgins at her edgy best: provocative and heart-warming poems of high jinks, jittery grief and telling social comment by a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of the lives of the Irish dispossessed, before as well as since the demise of the Celtic tiger. This was her first new collection after her retrospective, Throw in the Vowels, and was followed by Tongulish.

'It shouldn't be unusual to hear a smart, sassy, unabashed, female working-class voice in Irish writing. But it is. Higgins's achievement doesn't depend on that rarity value, but it is certainly amplified by it. Higgins is, quite consciously, an artistic outsider... a unique fusion of wry, deadpan humour on the one side and absolute sincerity on the other. She doesn't congratulate herself for her sympathy with those who are (in this case literally) outside the world of art. She simply sees and writes. Her humour and playfulness keep sentimentality and self-righteousness resolutely at bay... She has made what is still the most direct and powerful statement of the class divide in Irish society... The boom years had no great effect on Higgins's voice, on her point of view or on her style. She had a manic linguistic energy long before the hysteria of the Tiger era quickened the pulse of the culture as a whole: Higgins could be regarded, in one of her guises, as Ireland's first rapper.... Her political satire hasn't lost its edge, but it no longer reads as a cry in the wilderness... Now the bubble's burst, we're left with our real treasures, and Rita Ann Higgins is one of them.' – Fintan O'Toole, writing in The Irish Times on Ireland Is Changing Mother: Click here to read the full review.

Rita Ann Higgins live at Ledbury Poetry Festival

Rita Ann Higgins reads and introduces a selection of her poems at Ledbury Poetry Festival on Friday 8th July 2017, when she shared the stage with fellow Irish poets Jane Clarke and Louis de Paor. The poems she reads are from her Bloodaxe collections Throw in the Vowels: New & Selected Poems, Ireland Is Changing Mother and Tongulish, plus new work. Filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce.

Rita Ann Higgins reads ten poems

Rita Ann Higgins reads ten poems in this short film: ‘God-of-the-Hatch Man’, ‘The Did-You-Come-Yets of the Western World’, ’Some People’, ‘An Awful Racket’, ‘Grandchildren’ and ‘It’s Platonic’ from Throw in the Vowels, and ‘Tongued and Grooved’, ‘He Was No Lazarus’, ‘No One Mentioned the Roofer’ and ‘Ireland Is Changing Mother’ from Ireland Is Changing Mother. Neil Astley filmed Rita Ann reading a selection of her poems at her home in Ballybane, Galway, in April 2012. This film is from the DVD-anthology In Person: World Poets, filmed & edited by Pamela Robertson-Pearce & Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2017).

Rita Ann Higgins reads two poems from her Bloodaxe collections, ‘This Was No Ithaca’ from Ireland Is Changing Mother and ’She’s Easy’ from Tongulish:

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