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REVIEWS
POETRY REVIEW
Winter 1996/97
The
Home Front
by
Elizabeth Lowry
Sunny Side
Plucked (Bloodaxe),
£8.95
ISBN 1 85224 375
9
Whatever their
final preference, Rita Ann Higgins's and Paul Meehan's fans should
be pleased by Bloodaxe's decision to bring out the selected poems
of these two popular Irish poets simultaneously. Side by side,
their complementary approaches are thrown into even sharper
relief: while Paula Meehan is sophisticated and allusive, Rita Ann
Higgins goes in for plain speaking; where Meehan takes considered
detours into
academe, Higgins doesn't give a damn. For the reader with a ten
pound note to spend, choosing between them will largely be a
matter of taste.
Higgins's poems are really anecdotes -- it's not how she tells
them, so much as what she tells that matters, although the absence
of an obvious technique can sometimes be a happy effect of her
work. Sunny Side Plucked contains a generous sample of her
signature sketches of urban Irish working-class types: young
mothers on welfare, lottery players, blanket men and coal men,
charity cases for the Vincent de Paul society,
butter voucher and coupon savers. These are rounded out here and
there into gritty character studies, the best of which stick in
the mind because of the unfussy way they are presented -- bored
Evangeline pining on her way to Folan's shop for "a villa /
off the something / coast of France" ('Evangeline'); tarty
Karen Reilly who is shot in the back while driving a stolen car
down the Falls Road ('The Trouble with Karen Reilly'); restless
Philomena, whose ranges are cured after she is given "the
shocks" ('Philomena's Revenge'), and 'Tommy's Wife', bleakly
anonymous, slowly drained by her marriage to Tommy (who
"likes Guinness, sex and unemployment").
Galway-born Higgins knows this
world, its aspirations and frustrations, and is able to capture
its detail and its voice. The particulars of her backdrop -- net
curtains, leather jackets, home perms, the Saturday night dance,
Chesterfield sofas and phone tables bought on hire-purchase -- are
filled in with economy, establishing a minimalist setting for
brisk dramatic monologues with suitably colloquial-sounding titles
such as 'Anything is Better than Emptying Bins', 'Its All Because
We're Working-Class' and 'It Wasn't the Father's Fault'. At its
most successful the transparency of Higgins's vision contributes
to a flatness of expression which gives its own depressing point
to the material. 'It Wasn't the Father's Fault', for instance, is
an impassively nasty little story about a child whose father beat
him up with a baseball bat, with the result that "he was /
never right since":
Standing
behind the kitchen table
one Sunday before Mass
his mother said,
"If Birdie Geary
hadn't brought
that cursed baseball bat
over from America,
none of this would have happened."
The bathos of that last remark, in
which natural feeling hasn't so much been suppressed as
steamrollered out of shape, suggests emotional depletion with
greater immediacy than a stanza of commentary could have at this
point. Higgins's characters queue for the dole, save up those
vouchers, and everyone keeps on going to Mass; but the missed
connections are also heartbreakingly in the air in 'The Deserter',
narrated by a woman whose unsatisfactory marriage has been given
an injection of tenderness by
the death of her husband ("he made a lovely corpse"),
the prosy advice of 'If You Want to get Closer to God'
("Knock Shrine's your man ... plenty of wheelchairs /
plenty of buses"), and the drab promises of Consumpta the
hairdresser in 'I Want to Make Love to Kim Basinger' ("hot
oil / is the jigger you need ... you'll taste your tea then / and
it won't be wearing a moustache, / mark my words"). Promises,
platitudes. Where Higgins herself appears as a character alongside
the Karens and Consumptas, her poetic ambitions are treated with
appealing self-mockery. An afternoon spent trying to learn her
trade in the reference room of the Galway County Library is
scuppered by a bowsy with a cough who has settled on the poetry
section as a change of scene from the local soup kitchen. Here the
banal keeps breaking in, rather as it does in the poems
themselves:
I started with Heaney,
you started to cough.
You coughed all the way to Ormsby,
I was on the verge of Mahon.
Daunted, I left you the Ulster Poets
to consume or cough at.
In fact, Higgins is consistently self-deprecating about her
bookishness. The odd literary or classical theme is ruthlessly cut
down to size by being relayed in Irish slang -- her Donna Laura
calls Petrarch a "louser", Hera refers to Zeus as
"loveen", and 'The Flute Girl's Dialogue', a downmarket
version of the Symposium, begins with the freewheeling lines
"Plato, come out now / with your sunburnt legs on ya."
'The Quarrel', in which the story of the Trojan war is
transplanted to a Shantalla tenement, has Apollo practising the
lyre, "mad to get / on The Late Late Show", while
Zeus''s activities -- in the vicinity of Coole Park, presumably --
make "swans all over Sligo" take "cover, much
cover". Yeats must be turning in his grave.
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