E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

L ike a lot of people, who knew and loved him - and I am not referring here intrusively to his closest relations or loved ones, but instead, to the poets, editors and publishers who worked with him - I am having a hard time with the death of the great Irish poet, and person, Kevin Higgins . Though we often disagreed on politics, and though we had drifted apart, he WAS the person who wrote the introduction to my Salmon Poetry selected poems, Seaway , and he WAS the person I included in almost every anthology or event I organised for over a decade or more, starting with Poets against the War . He felt like a soul brother to me, and for many years we met relatively often, had dinner or drinks, and spoke about poetry. Our partners met with us, sometimes; and we met not only in London, but Paris, New York, Budapest, and of course, Galway. Other than Patrick Chapman , he is the Irish poet I feel closest to, aesthetically, but also, in how we view the established order of poetic things (that

  Terrible sad news - the major Irish satirical poet of his generation, and a poet of comedic genius, and powerful authentic resonance, Kevin Higgins, has died yesterday in Ireland. Higgins, the author of many poetry books, most published by Galway-based Irish press Salmon, was known and admired world-wide, but nonetheless deserved  even more  recognition from the established great and the good - i.e. the prizes, medals, crowns, gongs and other titles thrown at many many lesser lights - except, he was so brilliantly biting, critical, and scathing of all that he spied as dishonest, unfair or wretched. Sweet-natured and hilarious in person, on paper, he was terrifyingly sharp-witted, and sparing of no prisoners. In a just world, he would be seen as the greatest of recent Irish poets, and even so, is recognised in anthologies and critical studies everywhere as the most acute, savagely clever, and startling of Irish political poets. The measure of his unexpected reach - a 'Heineken poe