Higgins’ poetry pays for the spuds

MOST poetry collections don’t concern themselves with souped-up Honda Civics, the HSE’s payroll system, swaggering wheel clampers, George Lee, the indignity of a concession refusal at a theatre’s ticket desk or cryptosporidium. However, Ireland is Changing Mother isn’t most poetry collections.
In nine books over 25 years, Galway poet Rita Ann Higgins has explored injustice and survival in ordinary lives through a blackly funny voice. Her latest work is alive to the personal but was forged in the furnace of political corruption and economic collapse.
“It’s a frustration,” she says of the driving force behind this collection. “That’s always been there in earlier books, just maybe more so here. I hadn’t recognised that earlier. But now that the poems are out there, I see there is an awful lot of frustration. It reads as anger but, for me, it’s just utter frustration.”
Poems like The Darkness and Where Have All Our Scullions Gone, in particular, bristle at the swollen culture of entitlement fostered by the boom years. Ms Higgins uses succinct imagery – “it was chauffeurs to Cheltenham/it was take me from terminal one to terminal three/but don’t put me in with the plebs” – to evoke the arrogance and irresponsibility of the period.
Compassion for the outsider and the powerless is a recurring theme of her work. Fury at the exploitation of privilege is balanced by a sympathetic acknowledgement of those trapped by the consequences of the property crash.
“And what do the sons and daughters of the Celtic tiger call them mother?/The ones who camped out in the floods/to get the semi with the decking” asks a voice in The Builder’s Mess, a poem littered with stark observations from a ghost estate. “They call them a travesty mother” is the sombre reply.
“Books evolve,” says Ms Higgins. “These poems wouldn’t have just appeared. I had been building up to the book. It just so happened that a lot more of them had a social element because of what was happening.”
While Ms Higgins delves into the private in poems like Visiting My Father at Christmas (“The booby traps are under/the Quality Street box”) and Hangovers Never Touched Him, it’s the political clash between Shell and the people of Rossport over the controversial Corrib gas project that inspires the most elegant poem in the collection.
The Brent Geese Chorus opens in biblical style – “On the seventh day God rested,/and North Mayo was fashioned/and it had no likeness anywhere in the world./And on the eighth day along came Shell” – before charting, in uncompromising language, the bitter dispute from the viewpoint of residents who oppose the oil company’s plans.
Ms Higgins was moved to write the poem after reading The Rossport 5: Our Story, about those jailed during the campaign.
“I thought that was the most heartbreaking book,” she explains. “It’s just the contempt that Shell had for the people of North Mayo that made me absolutely irate and frustrated and a poem came out of that. They’re a community who are well able to speak up for themselves but I wrote that poem. I’ve no regrets about it.”
In a glowing review of Ireland is Changing Mother, columnist Fintan O’Toole (who launched the book) called Ms Higgins “Ireland’s first rapper”. Though grateful for the recognition, she refuses to dwell on its accuracy or significance. Higgins is matter-of-fact about it. Her focus is her work and she is wary of anything that might distract her.
“I was gob-smacked, actually. I didn’t expect it. And I don’t know how to respond to that. You take these things with a grain of salt. That’s a positive comment, ‘Thank you very much’. You go on. They won’t write your next poems. They don’t pay the rent.”
Ms Higgins’ poetry has been taught in universities as prestigious as Oxford and Yale and she is just back from a reading tour in the US, with three other poets, to mark the launch of a new anthology of Irish female poetry by Wake Forest Press. Indicating the broad appeal of her work, she frequently reads in Mountjoy, Limerick and Portlaoise prisons.
“It was great to read in New York and Berkley University. It’s a long way from Mervue Bus,” she says of the journey from her debut collection. “And next week, I’ll be reading in the women’s prison in Dublin. So it changes.”
She quickly swats away any temptation to indulge herself in the afterglow of these invitations. “It’s wonderful when people praise you but you can’t wear it like a coat,” she says. “You have to say: ‘Go raibh míle maith agat’ and just get on with life. It’s a wonderful thing but doesn’t buy you spuds.”
Born into a large family in a working-class estate in Galway in 1955, Ms Higgins left school at 14 to work in a factory. After the birth of her first child in 1977, she contracted TB. During her recovery, Higgins read Animal Farm and Wuthering Heights – the first novels she’d ever read – and it lit a flame.
A chance encounter with Jessie Lendennie, founder of the Clare-based Salmon Poetry, at a writing workshop provided her with “guidance and encouragement”. Ms Higgins started writing poetry in 1982 and her first book, Goddess on the Mervue Bus, appeared in 1986. A former writer in residence at the National University of Ireland, Galway, she has also written six plays and a screenplay.
Conversational and intimate, Ms Higgins’ poetry gives the impression that the words arrive fully formed on the page. But it’s just that – an impression. A lot of work goes into making it seem effortless.
“It takes me generally two weeks to write a poem,” she explains. “If I like it, if it means a lot to me, I’ll stay with it. I have to give it that time. Turn the phone off, not be going into town meeting my friends. I work hard at my poems and plays. But I love it, too.”

Ireland is Changing Mother is published by Bloodaxe Books.