With CD of poems read by Rita Ann Higgins
Throw in the Vowels is a new retrospective from Rita Ann Higgins: provocative and heart-warming poems of high jinks, jittery grief and telling social comment by a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of the Irish dispossessed. The 2010 reissue of this title includes a free audio CD of poems read by the author. She has since published two later collections, Ireland Is Changing Mother (2011) and Tongulish (2016).
‘A brilliantly spiky, surreal blend of humour and social issues. Her poems are a witty mix of the erotic and the upfront political from a female perspective, with wonderful rhythms that effortlessly incorporate direct speech’ – Ruth Padel, Independent on Sunday.
‘A quite untameable poet. Higgins roams the provincial towns and countryside of Ireland fomenting rebellion and writing with unstaunchable energy of everything warm and unrespectable in Irish life. Her voice is like nobody else’s, simple but not naive, raucous but sympathetic’ – Peter Porter, PBS Bulletin.
‘Higgins’s voices are so distinctive and real that a whole world of semi-rural Irish poverty rises around the reader with the jolting acuity of an excellent documentary…an hilarious, absorbing and thoroughly disturbing experience’ – Kate Clanchy, Independent.
‘Rita Ann Higgins means a unique line in human warmth; and a unique colour of humour and a unique clarity’ – Paul Durcan.
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.
Ireland & EU: Click here to order from Books Upstairs in Dublin
USA: Click here to order from Indiebound or Bookshop.org
