Reviews/Articles
Review of Time Gentlemen, Please by Kevin Higgins
from Todd Swift's blogspot:
Kevin Higgins recently had this said of him, in Justin Quinn’s The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800-2000, "Chapter 12, The disappearance of Ireland": Kevin Higgins (b. 1967) has demonstrated a good satirical savagery when facing the new Ireland. His first collection, The Boy with No Face (2005), contains many poems in conventional lyrical modes (in which he is weaker) and others with a social critique as lithe and imaginative as that of the con-merchants who run the show. He has perhaps acquired much of his sharpness by taking part in poetry slams. ... A satire which eschews moderation and openly admits its own savagery can only succeed.
His second collection, Time Gentlemen, Please, is just out with Salmon, in Ireland. I think it is an extraordinary book, easily better than The Boy With No Face. There are any number of rising Irish poets, at any time, but Higgins must now count high among that list, alongside Wheatley, Morrissey (who recently won the National Poetry Competition), and a few others. They are very good, very intelligent poets. Higgins is something else. He has something that I admire, as a critic, more than anything else: style. Not just style, a completely original style. Indeed, though I usually cringe at this term, he has a "voice" all his own.
Or rather, his voice combines elements from other voices - Orwell, Morrissey (of The Smiths), Larkin, Kavanagh - in ways no one could have expected, or defended against. His tonal elements are unique because his own ontological position is so (in this sense invalidating the argument that language writes us - sometimes Galway does): he writes of miserabilist experience, down and out in Ireland, as a former Marxist now happily married, and seeing the onanistic error of his former ways. This grim, ironic, and rather acid backstory is combined with a pointed use of quasi-surreal image, and startlingly sure and nasty quips, that almost constitute a new sort of trope - half-metaphor, half-gripe. A lot of poets play with the punning equivalence between Karl and Groucho - but Higgins really does bridge the worlds of Marxist theory, and Marx Bros. praxis, with steely verve. I think he is the funniest Irish writer of his generation - which is saying a lot - and no other Irish writer has ever made me laugh aloud so often, other than Oscar Wilde. In some sense, his poetic is the reverse of Wilde's - a fart for fart's sake - as he avoids beauty and aims directly for "Truth" - which he then skewers. I'd say he was a Swiftian satirist, but that would belittle his poetic achievement. The poems, themselves, are aesthetic objects, full of complexity, irony, and nuance. He is simply the very best comedic poet of his Irish generation. But I must go further - he is the best politico-comedic poet - which is a rarer, and stranger combination (one thinks of Paul Durcan, but even he can't hold a candle to Higgins).
I suppose I could name drop all day, so I want to quote a few lines. The collection is in five sections, and offers a generous 70-plus worth of poems - enough for two slim volumes from some presses. In almost every poem, something happens that is jaw-droppingly odd, and usually involves an unexpected simile related to the shabby world of local or global politics (or the shabby streets of Galway, before the Celtic Tiger); in a sense, Higgins has found his objective correlative in Pravda, or CNN - as encountered in a grimy pub. He has transformed and updated Eliot's sawdust floors, and found new equivalents. No other poet writing in Ireland is as actually modern, or accurate, in connecting the flaws in human experience, to the ways of poetic expression. He's Prufrock, marooned in the West of Ireland, and no less cosmopolitan - the world has come to Galway City, at long last, via undersea cables.
Here are just a few examples:
"Morning slick as a tabloid supplement";
"each day's // metallic tap-water taste";
God is "a balding former Congressman for Wyoming";
"Instead of masturbation, I find socialism";
"the rich / green Lord Tennyson sea";
"the day on the verge of its first Kit Kat";
or, comparing the memory of his dead father to "this / orchestra of car-alarms / at four a.m" ...
and so on, for many more poems and pages. Time and again, Higgins uses humour, sharp observational skills, and bile, to compose brief, imagistic poems of original mood and rare power, to amuse, move, sadden, and inform. His work, therefore, is neither entirely lofty-Irish, and surely not opaque enough to excite the austere-experimental type - but it is undeniably poetry of full integrity, and major Irish poetry, for our time. I look forward to his next collection, as I would the reunion of The Smiths. It would / will be miserablist heaven. Todd Swift
Kevin Higgins - humour and provocative poetry which pulls no punchesBy Kernan Andrews, The Galway Advertiser, 27th March 2008
IS THE far left dominated by bullies who have abandoned many of their principles to ‘get into bed’ with questionable elements? Is it time for the Left in Ireland to look hard at where they are and what they stand for?
The acclaimed Galway poet Kevin Higgins will launch his second collection of poems Time Gentlemen, Please in the Galway City Museum, on Saturday at 1pm. The guest speaker will be Michael Gorman.
Time Gentlemen, Please is divided into five sections - From The Future - A Postcard Home; Ponders End; Firewood; A New City; and Last Testament - and through the personal and political, presenting a picture of where Kevin has come from, and what he is now.
It is a theme which comes across most strongly in the poems dealing with politics. Here the poet casts a critical - but always witty and desperately funny - eye over the Galway Left, its stance on the world, and his own role in it.
“In poems such as ‘My Militant Tendency’ and ‘To Curran’s Hotel’ I look at my own political past when I was a member of Labour Youth in Galway and a supporter of the militant tendency,” Kevin tells me. “Poems such as ‘The Cause’, ‘From Grosvenor Square To Here,’ and ‘The Annual Airshow Protest’ poke some more savage fun at my old friends on the far left.”
There is likely to be many a discussion about who Kevin is referring to in ‘The Annual Airshow Protest’: “The man, who every chance he gets/ticks you off for bearing false witness/against East Germany, hands out red balloons./His moustache stops to congratulate itself./His heartbeat hammers: Long Live Stalin!/Long Live Stalin! A guy with purple hair offers Food Not Bombs to an elderly/white woman with dreadlocks”.
Yet Kevin is also merciless in poking fun at himself. In ‘My Militant Tendency’ he remembers wanting to put “some fascist through a glass door arseways, but being 15, have to mow the lawn first” before proudly declaring: “Instead of masturbation, I find socialism”.
Kevin admits that Time Gentlemen, Please represents “a moving on for me from the far left causes which I used to support”.
“From the age of 15 to 27 I was an active Trotskyist,” he says. “I was the leader of the anti-poll tax campaign in the London Borough of Enfield when I lived there. From the age of 27 until, say, 38, a couple of years ago I thought it was a pity socialism was clearly now not going to happen. I was in a kind of mourning, I suppose. But now I think that, for all its faults, the society we have is far preferable to anything the ‘comrades’ would bring, were they, Lord protect us, ever to stumble into power.”
Yet it would be a mistake to think Kevin has suddenly had the tragedy/bad taste to become Galway’s Christopher Hitchens. Far from it.
“I don’t like George W Bush. I don’t support the Iraq war,” he declares. He was featured in the 100 Poets Against The War Anthology and retains his admiration for the writings of Leon Trotsky and George Orwell.
Indeed Kevin is something of a Galway George Orwell - a man firmly of the left, but never a blind, sycophantic, adherent.
“I think I have held firm to my principles, while at the same time evolving but I think the far left have abandoned many of theirs,” he says. “I have seen in practice too that issues such as workers rights, a basic fundamental issue for anyone who claims to be on the left, have been abandoned by elements of the Galway left in favour of building an ‘anti-war’ alliance which contains all sorts of questionable elements.
“There is more to politics than the Iraq war; and America isn’t to blame for all the world’s problems. The other thing that has really struck me is that, these days, the far left seems to be dominated by bullies. People who are more interested in browbeating than reasoned argument.”
The influence of Orwell runs deep as reflected in the poem ‘Firewood’. “It was provoked by an article I read in Socialist Worker last year which said, among other things, that ‘It’s problematic to describe what’s happening in Darfur as genocide’! I kid you not.”
In this moving poem, quotes from the article are juxtaposed with the growing fears of a mother who is stopped at a check point by armed men who may be soldiers or militants. Like that other left leaning admirer of Orwell, Billy Bragg, Kevin is more concerned by injustice against human life and dignity, and sees that as being above narrow political agendas.
Yet, Time Gentlemen, Please is never grim, due to Kevin’s ever present self deprecating humour.
“I always believe that even the worst situations can be rescued by a laugh,” he says. “Humour and wit - often of the blackest variety - are very important to me. I’d never want to be one of those serious, serious poets.”
Neither is the collection entirely political. It is often quite personal.
“In poems such as ‘Dad’, ‘Family Dispute’, and ‘Memory’ I look at my relationship with my father, which has not been easy. In ‘Dad’ I try to see things from his point of view,” says Kevin. “‘Tuesday’ sends up the foibles of middle-aged men, of whom, at the age of 40, I am now one.
“In ‘She Considers His Proposal’ I satirise myself. It’s a poem in which I say to my wife Susan: ‘if you had known what you were getting into, would you have still said yes?’ I think it’s crucial not to take yourself too seriously.”
Time Gentlemen, Please is published by Salmon Poetry. All are welcome to the launch.
Poetry of our own
Review by
Joe Conroy in Red Banner 32
The least controversial definition of poetry is ‘writing that doesn’t go all the way to the right-hand side of the page’ — which, given the parlous state of the rainforests, demands a greater justification for publishing it. But this book would pass any such test without breaking sweat, containing a substantial range of poems that bring a smile to the lips and a spark to the imagination. Readers of this magazine will know of Kevin Higgins in poetry and in prose, and his second collection confirms him as a poet the left should be listening to.
Often he deals with the usual material of poets always and everywhere: love requited and unrequited, the successes and failures of human relationships, nature, death and the rest. Anyone who avoided these would be no poet at all, and these eternal themes are treated here with an originality born of having lived and considered experiences, an originality that evokes recognition.
It is an unusual but quite refreshing thing to note about a poet of the left, but in his first collection The Boy With No Face (also published by Salmon, in 2005) Higgins actually succeeded better with such ‘non-political’ poetry than with the ‘political’. (Those quotation marks are there to signify the fluid and ultimately invisible boundary between the two, but you know what I mean.) Here, however, no such dissonance can be heard, and his political poems break higher ground. It’s not just that he avoids the pitfalls of versified sloganeering — although that is still something to be grateful for in itself — but that he doesn’t become any less poetic for being political.
Poetry dealing with the milestones and millstones of your life is nothing new, but it is rare to read poems that openly deal with the specifics of a socialist’s life. All of us go through more or less the same kind of things, but you go through them a bit differently if you’ve been determined since your youth to turn the world upside down. ‘My Militant Tendency’ (p 33) talks of being a teenager, but not by the commonplace reference points of songs on the radio or fashions followed:
It’s nineteen eighty two and I know everything.…
I’d rather be putting some fascist through
a glass door arseways, but being fifteen,
have to mow the lawn first.…
Instead of masturbation, I find socialism.
While others dream of businessmen bleeding
in basements, I promise to abolish double chemistry class
the minute I become Commissar.
Likewise, in ‘To Curran’s Hotel’ (p 34) the demolition of a local pub brings to mind left-wing meetings attended there rather than pints sunk and girls scored there. While other poems testify to someone who is no stranger to the usual ups and downs of personal life too, the particular swings and arrows of a life lived on the left are as fit a subject for poetry as anyone else’s.
A tense and awkward father-son relationship is painfully familiar, but ‘Dad’ (p 42) tells of one with politics added to the mix. Son tells father that all his ideas are wrong, to which father replies that if son had his way, Moors murderers would be let free to promote their memoirs. But in the end the son all but thanks his father for deciding to “allow me / to keep contradicting myself / until I find out what it is / I’m trying to say”.
A poet reacting to a historically meaningful site has been done many times before, but ‘St Petersburg Scenes’ (p 31) comes at it from the left:
a man, whose
role in his own Bolshevik fairytale
has long since earned him a place
on the FBI’s least wanted… gazes
meaningfully into the past.
This kind of self-deprecation in the presence of world-historic significance is rare but essential for any sane socialist, the injunction from the Parisian barricades to take the revolution seriously but not take ourselves too seriously.
Sometimes a poem here hits a nail on the head of the left’s faults. In ‘The Annual Air Show Protest’ (p 62) Higgins affirms that he would sooner campaign for Paris Hilton on a unicycle than fall in with the dreams of hoary nostalgic Stalinists. The influence of George Orwell is obvious in ‘From Grosvenor Square to Here’ (p 59):
Sentences that run on and on,
like a hacking cough. Exclamation
marks which can be seen coming
a mile off, as you load them onto
your machine gun tongue and fire!
You’ve hawked that suitcase
full of broken old slogans all the way…
if rigormortis could talk
this is how it would sound.
A wise man once said that someone who is seen on every picket is no good on any picket, because he’s only there for the sake of picketing. ‘The Cause’ (p 52) paints a cautionary picture of someone starched into the role of a professional protestor, going through the motions without feeling a thing:
Each morning he decides
what he’s against today,
puts on that screaming red beret
and goes; is years past the point
where the campaigner became
the mad fucker with the sign
But where do you go if you don’t go down these roads? ‘Death of a Revolutionary’ (p 39) describes a socialist leader carrying his “plastic bag / still packed with propaganda, / but the world going the other way”. While there was a time when “My every thought [was] part / of your master-plan”, the poet sits and concludes that “I do not say, as you did: / ‘We have kept the faith.’” Is this a rejection of a specific type of socialism, or of the whole idea of it? When you listen to The Who’s classic ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, you ask yourself whether this embittered look back in anger at 1968 and all that is a denial of revolution or a call for a better one. As the sublime Keith Moon drumming duels with the intelligent synthesiser, you draw your own conclusion, whatever Pete Townshend intended notwithstanding. It is only right that poetry throws up tough questions without easy answers, the ambiguity forcing you to think for yourself — and the poet’s own reading is not the only one possible.
Higgins’s criticisms of the left pave the way towards its renewal, not its repudiation, impetus for creating a left that is honest and liberating. Other poems show how little time he has for those who go over to the dark side. If there are fifty ways to leave your lover, there are many more ways to leave socialism. ‘Betrayals’ (p 50) tells witheringly of someone who takes refuge in a detoxed lifestyle when the workers refuse to play the progressive role allotted to them. ‘Page From The Diary Of An Officially Approved Person’ (p 57) is the story of a bought-and-paid-for poverty industrialist whose “new blonde hair / and state-sponsored smile are twin planks / in the Government’s anti-poverty strategy”. A revolutionary swaps his principles for a suburban marriage, a career in management and an early death in ‘Ending Up’ (p 53-4):
Catastrophe comes in many guises
and not always with the strident voice
of a doomed member of the Baader-Meinhof.
It also arrives, more quietly,
on the Essex side of the M25.
‘The Candidate’ (p 58) saw only the choice of “making up worlds that will never be… or grow up to be / Junior Minister for Counter-Terrorism”. He chooses the latter, and dreams of persecuting those who didn’t.
‘Firewood’ (p 61) is a good example of poetry reaching the parts that prose cannot. Eyewitness accounts of the genocide in Darfur are interspersed with glib comments from the wings (the left wing, unfortunately) like “It’s problematic to describe this as genocide. / The solution is not military intervention.” The common response to such horrors calls out for something or someone to go in and do something. While the US Marines are unlikely to improve anything they touch, the simple humanitarian instinct is ultimately far more worthwhile than the unfeeling rehearsal of pat slogans from a safe distance. To express the contradictions, doubts and tensions involved here is difficult, but this poem does a good job of it.
‘Careful Driver’ (p 84) provides the one line that exhibits a plain lack of imagination: “a bad week in Bognor Regis”. Now, I’ve never been to Bognor Regis, but I’ve a feeling that Kevin Higgins hasn’t either. To employ that much-maligned English seaside resort to conjure up humdrum mundanity smacks of the tired clichés of 1970s comedy with all its frilly shirt fronts and inaccurate Frank Spencer impersonations. But the fact that this slip stands alone among seventy-odd poems underlines that here is a poet who sands and polishes his words, who probably has a load more not yet finished enough to earn the light of day.
There are a couple of poems here just for us. The images and references will go over their heads in Poetry Ireland, but us socialists can catch them if we keep our eyes open. ‘The Interruption’ (p 16) stands in a long line of poems inspired by works of art, but the picture brought to life here (without being mentioned) is Boardman Robinson’s 1918 cartoon where a dinner party of capitalists is interrupted by the hand of Bolshevik revolution.
In ‘Kronstadt, Winter Song’ (p 32) “ghost insurgents / wander the white, / chasing remembered sparks / of Aurora”. This image of Aurora works (as all the best literary critics say) on several levels. The aurora borealis is a fantastic natural light show, of course, and Aurora was the goddess of the dawn. But a socialist reader may remember that it was the ship Aurora that launched the attack on the Winter Palace in 1917. The Kronstadters longed again for the spectacular dawn, but it was a spectacular dawn of real workers’ revolution.
The left should hurry to welcome this collection. Here is poetry that we can identify with, that tells of our hopes and fears and doubts and questions, that puts our lives on the map too. The fact that one of our own can tell such stories in a way that is so powerful and satisfying is something to be proud of. Anyone who responds to good poetry will find in Time Gentlemen, Please a collection to read and enjoy, but socialists especially can learn more from it of what we are and what we need to become.
from Red Banner 32
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