REVIEWS
THE IRISH TIMES
Saturday 29th
January 1994
Goddess
on the Mervue Bus; Witch in the Bushes; Philomena's Revenge (Salmon)
Some
poets achieve that distinctive stylisation of matter and manner
known as voice at an early age: for others, it's a life-long
evolution or a series of revisions. These three Rita Ann Higgins
reissues serve to remind us how swiftly this poet established her
own idiom, and hint at the difficulty of whither next?
It's a
terse, challenging and at best unsentimental voice, grounded in
the vernacular of a working-class milieu - housing-estates,
factories, buses: the voice, sometimes, of a friendly heckler:
Hey you! Wearers of brown acrylic pullovers,
a yellow stripe across your chestbone
means your mother is still alive,
think not of other people's undertones
of milk-white flesh, of touching thighs.
AnCo never trained you for this.
("The Apprentices")
Like
Paul Durcan, Higgins can deftly snatch a line from mass culture
("Mona doesn't die here/any more"); she also takes a
Durcanish stand on religious hypocrisy - the Jehovah's Witnesses
in "God Dodgers Anonymous", an uncharitable nun in the
brilliant "Jackdaw Jaundice". Sometimes, especially in
the later books, she is tempted to stretch a point beyond its
natural life-span, or widen the political or social comment into
generalisation. Her greatest resonance lies in characterisation,
in the small-scale and the close to home, where the real risks are
taken.
CAROL
RUMENS
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