Rita Ann Higgins at ease in Galway rain. Photo: Andrew Downes Jiving With Wasps: New and Selected Poems,
by Rita Ann Higgins
(Bloodaxe Books, €16.95 / £9.95)
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people”, the poet Adrian Mitchell famously pronounced.
Rita Ann Higgins doesn’t fall into that category. As readable and accessible a poet as the late Paul Durcan, she could fairly be described as the voice of the downtrodden, the voice of the dispossessed, the voice of the disadvantaged, a voice crying out for truth and justice.
But not a voice crying in the wilderness – she has created her own audience, a large, appreciative one well versed in poetry, a poetry that says what it means and means what it says.
In poems that are frank, provocative and full of outrage yet tempered with compassion, she engages the reader with plain, unpretentious, earthy speech. Every arrow hits the mark. She castigates hypocrisy whether it manifests itself in priest or politician. She is scathing about the excesses, the greed and sheer stupidity of the Celtic Tiger years.
A stalwart champion of women and women’s rights, she stands up for the marginalised women of 1916, she highlights the tragedy of Hannah Greally who shamefully was incarcerated in St Loman’s Psychiatric Hospital in Mullingar during the 1940s and 50s and she speaks for the women who are voiceless, patronised and abused to this day.
Her vivid Covid sequence serves as a reminder of the dark days of lockdown, isolation and death in Ireland, her anger and frustration at the plight of the people of Gaza and the refugees who are not welcome in many wealthy countries, including Ireland, is palpable.
In a career spanning over forty years, she has ploughed her own furrow, a rich, deep furrow that has brought her many rewards and awards. A member of Aosdána and an Ireland Reads Ambassador, among her many awards are the Peadar O’Donnell Award in 1989 and the Living Poets Society in 2021.
Jiving With Wasps, a retrospective collection drawing on a dozen books of poetry published over four decades, casts a clear, lively, and at times subversive eye on contemporary Ireland and contributes in no small way towards the forging of the conscience of the race.