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REVIEWS
THE IRISH TIMES
25th January
1997
Sara
Berkeley on new work from two Irish poets
Women
in and out of love
Sunny
Side Plucked (Bloodaxe)
Rita
Ann Higgins's New and Selected Poems, is a river of stories and
portraits. From the outset, with it's cheerful dedication to her
twelve siblings, there is a sense of plenty to go round. It is the
best of times and it is the worst of times in Higgins's poetry.
She is a town-crier of modern hardship: the urban scourages of
drink, unemployment, the breadline, the life on the hire purchase
system looms large in the poems, which are also lit up by the
funny, affectionate moments in life, and by her odd, secret way of
seeing.
Higgins
offers gems of the truly bizarre: the butcher who wants to shout
"Lapis, Lazuli Lapis Lazuli", but says something banal
instead: the witch in herself who wants to scramble an American
man's eggs. The book is a slice of life, full of the kinds of
things people are always saying and doing, which she gets so
right. There is so much direct speech it's like an
anthropologist's treasure chest: here, in these pages, is how
Irish people spoke in the 1990s.
Some
of the poems are too raw, and some don't live up to the single
good idea of the title (such as "I Want to Sleep with Kim
Basinger"). But her lovely, quick insights into the human
heart - a man saying to his wife as they make love "Gloria
love, Gloria/let on I'm tall" - and her unhesitating, funny,
gritty exposition of the viscera of life, more than make up for
the few weeds that should have been pulled. Higgins, in her own
words, is "cross-legged on a lonely molar", and I salute
her with delight.
Sara
Berkeley lives in California where she works as a technical
writer, her most recent collection of poetry, Facts about Water,
was published in 1994
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