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

I used to be a close friend of the poet Kevin Higgins ; I am not especially close to him anymore - by that, I mean, we haven't seen each other in three or four years, at least, don't speak on the phone, and rarely email, if ever - but of course have some facebook contact, now and then.  I was very sorry when his mother died, and told him so. I mention this because, though I am fond of Kevin, and he wrote an introduction to a book of mine from his own publisher, Salmon, there isn't any literary back scratching going on these days, if ever there was any, between us. Things just drifted, as they do, as people in middle age become embroiled in their own days and ways. I can write what I am about to say without fear of feeling compromised, or in any way, hindered.  If anything, my own familiarity with the man and all his poems (I have met him on perhaps a dozen occasions, sometimes with his talented partner, on two continents, and in major cities like Paris, New York, London...

Whereabouts for JulietPoyntz (1886-1937) You deliver envelopes you must under no circumstances open to men whose names you never ask in hotel lobbies in Baltimore, Copenhagen, Shanghai… No one you know has seen you in three years. On a New York street you happen upon an old friend, you used to like to disagree with – those big opinioned, diner nights you can’t quite forget – talk over your new found disgust: the white-walled cells into which you’ve seen people you call ‘comrade’ one by one vanish to be kept awake all night and confess under extreme electric light. Over coffee you are full of the book you’re planning to write. Already evening. Earlier today, at a chateaux in central France, Edward married Mrs Simpson.   You leave your room at 353 West 57th Street to buy The New York Times or some Lucky Strike cigarettes. No luggage nor extra clothes. Behind you, everything you own. A solitary candle still burni...

There are several strands of Irish poetry criticism by practitioners worth reading - one thinks of the serious Heaney essays, the playful, Quixotic Muldoon ones, and then those by a variety of more experimental Irish poets.  And then there is the Kevin Higgins essay.  Unlike any other poet-critic in Ireland, Higgins is now virtually unique, also, in the UK, for his prose style and approach.  Higgins, a very good, and clever, poet, is always lucid, straightforward, honest, to the point of bluntness, and funny; that he is also politically concerned without being (anymore) a fanatic is a plus.  He has modelled himself, clearly, on Orwell - but Orwell was not a poet.   Sean O'Brien comes to mind, or perhaps Randall Jarrell , but Higgins is not as dandyish as the latter, or as partial as the former.   Mentioning The War: Essays & Reviews 1999-2011  from Salmon, is therefore a welcome book, because it gathers together scattered hack work and puts it...

[editor's note: I've posted this review gladly, as it offers an alternative position on a collection that I personally admire a great deal.] Phil Brown reviews Frightening New Furniture by Kevin Higgins My first experience of Kevin Higgins was through the anthology Identity Parade (Bloodaxe 2010). The sample we get of Higgins in this anthology is enough to leave any reviewer somewhat excited at the prospect of getting their teeth into his latest collection. Poems like 'Almost Invisible' and 'The Great Depression' emit such a visceral bleakness wrapped in aural excellence as to leave you with the feeling of being in the presence of ‘the real thing’. And so, it was with great excitement that I awoke one day to find that the generous Mr. Swift had posted me a copy of Higgins’ latest collection, Frightening New Furniture for review. That was four months ago now. How naïve I was. I started off by reading the thing cover to cover in two sittings. ‘Hmmmmm’ I t...

Kevin Higgins , the Galway-based poet and satirist, has written a review of my 2009 collection, Mainstream Love Hotel , from Tall-lighthouse (No. 23), for The Wolf, James Byrne 's uniquely important little magazine - perhaps the most adventurous and critically febrile of all the British poetry magazines - skirting as it does the main and marginal streams, and bridging the Atlantic effortlessly.  This issue features poems by Evan P. Jones, Richard Parker, Anne Carson, James Brookes , and an interview with Alfred Corn , among other highlights.  Higgins knows me well enough to note the curious way my work explores both theology and sexology: "One sometimes gets the impression that his [Swift's] politer lyrics are a kind of trick on the reader which gives him the element of surprise when he decides to unveil the spoiled priest in a brothel (or some other such enemy of politeness and hope) he has waiting around the corner from us."  This is true, I think, and is exactly w...

The third poem in this series of contemporary "British and Irish" classics is by Galway-based poet Kevin Higgins . Higgins can be said to have introduced a paradigm shift in Irish poetry around the turn of the century - away from, on the one hand, Joycean avant-gardism, and, on the other, Heanyesque sincerity. Instead, Higgins returns Irish writing to its third policeman, Satire. Not the po-mo irony of Muldoon , mind you - not the bitter loam of Kavanagh - not the high tone of Yeats - but as down-and-dirty Swift as it gets, with the additional blade-in-the-apple of Aubade-era Larkin . Higgins has turned Galway into a Higginsland - the new Boom-and-Bust Ireland of power lunches, Polish waitresses, and sudden economic collapse - and turned his caustic eye on the country as a whole. With a dash of performance hubris, he is that rare thing - a crowd pleaser with the mirror turned on the audience. 'The Couple Upstairs' is one of Higgins's gentler, more Larkinesque p...

Eyewear is pleased to celebrate the 40th birthday of Irish poet Kevin Higgins today, with a poem of his. Higgins is one of the best of the new generation of Irish poets, and by far the most savage in his wit. His new book from Salmon is forthcoming in 2008. Days We’d let the Daddy-long-legs take the tower-block hallway, as we took time out from demos in support of those more fortunate than ourselves for a feast of taramsalata on vintage brown bread washed down with the best can of Kestrels a fifty pence piece could buy. Our kitchen sink may have been a failed utopian experiment; the revolutionary group we’d just joined a corpse passing wind. But all we needed was a draft to sit in to talk about Agent Orange; and with your rolled cigarettes, my missing teeth, we were insurgents waiting to be hanged at dawn; as we watched the flat be torn apart by a Keith Moon cat. All dressed down and someone to be. Whatever happened to alienation? Those were the days.