Free Ireland shipping on orders over €30 | Free Worldwide shipping on orders over €60
0

Mentioning the War: Essays & Reviews 1999-2011 / Kevin Higgins

Mentioning the War: Essays & Reviews 1999-2011

By: Kevin Higgins

€14.00
Best known for his dark, satirical poems, Kevin Higgins published his first book review in The Galway Advertiser in June 1999. Reading Mentioning the War, it becomes obvious that Higgins is not like other critics. An enthusiastic advocate for the work of the new generation of poets who have emerged from Ireland’s thriving live poetry scene; he is also a m...
ISBN 978-1-908836-12-0
Pub Date Saturday, April 07, 2012
Cover Image © Lisavan | Dreamstime.com
Page Count 218
Share on
Best known for his dark, satirical poems, Kevin Higgins published his first book review in The Galway Advertiser in June 1999. Reading Mentioning the War, it becomes obvious that Higgins is not like other critics. An enthusiastic advocate for the work of the new generation of poets who have emerged from Ireland’s thriving live poetry scene; he is also a merciless opponent of hypocrisy and pretentiousness wherever he finds it. His writing is overtly political in a way that draws comparison with George Orwell – the subject of two extended essays here. It would be impossible to agree with everything in this book; it is a book which often disagrees with itself. But on subjects as diverse as socialist poetry and neoconservatism, funding for the arts and the anti-war movement, Higgins informs, infuriates and entertains, as any good critic should. 


“The importance of Higgins, in particular, in spearheading a whole new poetry reading/performance movement in Ireland over the last decade cannot be overstated…he is important not just to readers who might agree with his political or ideological critiques but also to practitioners and students of poetry itself regardless of their ideological inclinations.” Philip Coleman 

“There’s an arresting phrase, a new angle on a writer or a political position you thought you already knew about, in just about every piece here…The insights range from the literary to the existential to the seriously amusing…one of the things Mentioning the War offers, almost incidentally, is an insider’s account of how to learn to write.” John Goodby 

Kevin Higgins

KEVIN HIGGINS was born in London in 1967.  Along with his wife and fellow poet Susan Millar DuMars, he was founder and co-organiser of Over The Edge literary events in Galway. Over the Edge celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2023. Kevin published six full collections of poems with Salmon Poetry: The Boy With No Face (2005), Time Gentlemen, Please (2008), Frightening New Furniture (2010), The Ghost In The Lobby (2014), Sex and Death at Merlin Park Hospital (2019), Ecstatic (2022), as well as Song of Songs 2:0 – New & Selected Poems (Salmon, Spring 2017).  His poems also feature in Identity Parade – New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010) and in The Hundred Years’ War: modern war poems (Ed Neil Astley, Bloodaxe May 2014). Kevin was satirist-in-residence with the alternative literature website The Bogman’s Cannon 2015-16. 2016 – The Selected Satires of Kevin Higgins was published by NuaScéalta in 2016. "The Minister For Poetry Has Decreed" was published by Culture Matters (UK) also in 2016. 


Kevin was a highly experienced workshop facilitator and several of his students have gone on to achieve publication success. He facilitated poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre and taught Creative Writing at Galway Technical Institute for fifteen years. Kevin was also the Creative Writing Director for the NUI Galway International Summer School and taught on the NUIG BA Creative Writing Connect programme. His poems have been praised by, among others, Tony Blair’s biographer John Rentoul, Observer columnist Nick Cohen, writer and activist Eamonn McCann, historian Ruth Dudley Edwards, and Sunday Independent columnist Gene Kerrigan; and have been quoted in The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Times (London), Hot Press magazine, The Daily Mirror and on The Vincent Browne Show, and read aloud by Ken Loach at a political meeting in London. 

He published topical political poems in publications as various as The New European, The Morning Star, Dissent Magazine (USA), Village Magazine (Ireland), & Harry’s Place. The Stinging Fly magazine described Kevin as “likely the most widely read living poet in Ireland”. One of Kevin’s poems features in A Galway Epiphany, the final instalment of Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series of novels which is just published. 

His work has been broadcast on RTE Radio, Lyric FM, and BBC Radio 4. His book The Colour Yellow & The Number 19: Negative Thoughts That Helped One Man Mostly Retain His Sanity During 2020 was published in late by Nuascealta. His extended essay Thrills & Difficulties: Being A Marxist Poet In 21st Century Ireland was published in pamphlet form by Beir Bua Press in 2021. Kevin passed away on Tuesday 11th January, 2023 at the age of 55.

From Mentioning the War by Kevin Higgins:

An Arid Season 
by Michael D Higgins 

An Arid Season is Michael D Higgins’ third poetry collection. Its publication after the 11 year hiatus since his previous collection, The Season Of Fire, is certain to get both literary and political mouths chattering. Higgins’ high profile as Labour Party spokesperson on Foreign Affairs and possible presidential candidate pretty much guarantee this will be one of those rare poetry books that everyone—from earnest young women with politically correct earrings to literary tweed jackets who’ve had one brandy too many—will feel it necessary to have some sort of opinion about.
The most common reaction though to Michael D’s poetry is a kind of bemused bewilderment at the fact that it exists. Most people tend to think it somehow exotic or strange that here is an elected representative who, as well as asking Brian Cowen questions in the Dáil and holding clinics in the Atlanta Hotel on Saturday mornings, also writes poems. Many politicians, from Pat Rabbitte to Padraic Conneely, are performers, perhaps even artists of a sort. But when one thinks of them as a group, poetry is generally speaking not the first thing that comes to mind.
One of the difficulties Higgins has faced as a poet is the lack of real critical engagement with his work. Those who admire his politics—and they are many, especially among those in the arts—find it difficult to apply to his poetry the standard of criticism they would routinely apply to any other poet’s work. The themes in this collection are a mix of the personal and the political. In ‘Pol Pot In Anlon Veng’, he deals with politics at its most surreal, taking us into the mad world of Pol Pot in a mostly understated poem in the course of which the architect of the killing fields chillingly announces that: “He is finished/He says/With politics.”
In the personal poem ‘Conversations’ Michael D pleads with his daughter Alice Mary that they should “Have conversations/ Instead of rows”. In the overlong title poem ‘An Arid Season’ he talks in rather abstract and desolate terms about the “darkness” he sees on the political horizon; while in the short poem ‘Nocturne 2’ he nicely describes the quiet death of a moth: “Lonely in its last/Weak beat/Of Death.” 
His best poems are those, such as the excellent and disturbing two page narrative ‘The Madman’s Visitor’, in which he avoids rhetoric and sticks to the images: “Past the fragrant nuns she moved/Defeating the cacophony of their metal bowls,/A symphony in duty/To the God/ For whom they starched their headresses/And sterilised their instruments.” His weakest poems are those overwhelmed by rhetoric and abstraction. ‘The Sense-Voices of Spirit’ in eight short lines has the words spirit, grief, sorrow, time, space, and void, but not a single concrete image to help readers link these concepts and emotions to the tangible world of things we can touch, smell, or taste. Even if An Arid Season does, on balance, contain just a little more chaff than wheat, Michael D Higgins proves himself to be a poet of more range than most and there is certainly good poetry here. In ‘Old Waders on Koh Samet’ a poem inspired by his friend Paddy Leahy who went to spend the last of his life in Thailand, he beautifully expresses strong emotions in a quiet way. And in ‘Revivalists’ he proves himself capable of putting his sense of humour to good satirical use.

Galway Advertiser, August 5th, 2004



George Orwell:
Anything but a saint

This year’s centenary of George Orwell’s birth at Motihari in Bengal, India on 25 June 1903 has seen a marked upturn in interest in both his writing and in the man himself. Penguin have republished pretty much everything he ever wrote—both novels and non-fiction—in a series of glossy volumes, which basically add up to a collected works. There have also been two new biographies, both of which have, to varying degrees, tended to try and shift the spotlight away from George Orwell the stubborn teller of inconvenient political and social truths, and onto Eric Blair the man behind the pseudonym. There is certainly something to be said for this sort of approach: as someone who has read Orwell’s work voraciously over the years, I know that I certainly relished the opportunity to leaf through the grubby details of his life. But it also has its limitations.
The fact that he visited prostitutes, made throwaway comments insulting gay contemporaries such as W H Auden and didn’t like Scottish people is, of course, on one level all very interesting. On another level though, it is also completely irrelevant, doing nothing to diminish his critiques of capitalism and Stalinism in works such as Homage to Catalonia, The Road to Wigan Pier, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. I once heard someone say that everything Karl Marx had ever written could be dismissed as “rubbish” because he had throughout his life failed to properly provide for his family and (if that wasn’t bad enough) then got his housekeeper Helene Demuth pregnant. If we were to use, for example, the fact that Orwell apparently sometimes paid for sex to try and in any way diminish his achievement as a writer and political thinker, then this is the rather intellectually limited road we’d be heading down.
George Orwell was certainly flawed, both as a man and as a writer. When he came back to England in 1927, after a five year stint as a Colonial Policeman in Burma, and decided to ‘become a writer’ he looked like an unpromising wannabe indeed. The poet Ruth Pitter was a neighbour of his at the time:

He wrote so badly. He had to teach himself writing. He was like a cow with a musket.… I remember one story that never saw the light of day… it began “Inside the park, the crocuses were out…” Oh dear, I’m afraid we did laugh, but we knew he was kind, because he was good to our old sick cat.

Like most fledgling writers he started off by writing reams of grandiose garbage. According to Bernard Crick’s 1980 biography, George Orwell: A Life, the worst of this appears to have been a fragment of a play about a couple whose baby is dying because they can’t afford an operation she desperately needs. Despite their desperate need for money Francis, the father, refuses a job writing 

advertising copy for “Pereira’s Surefire Lung Balm”… because the firm are swindling crooks, the substance is noxious, and, besides, he’s got his artistic integrity to consider. When his wife reminds him of Baby’s needs, he suggests that for her to prostitute herself would be no worse than the job she wants him to take. Then the scenario turns abruptly from naturalism to expressionism… “Everything goes dark, there is a sound like roaring waters.… the furniture is removed”; and we are in a timeless prison cell, in something like the French Revolution, with POET, POET’S WIFE and CHRISTIAN who “sits… reading a large book. He has a placard inscribed DEAF around his neck.”

If a contemporary version of this early Orwell lived around the corner from me, I have no doubt that I would spend a good deal of time desperately trying to avoid him. I have known such people, and they rarely grow up to produce masterpieces!
The early Orwell’s politics were similarly unfocused and adolescent. Looking back on his earlier self from the vantage point of 1936 he has this to say in The Road to Wigan Pier:

I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed; to be one of them against their tyrants. And, chiefly because I had to think everything out in solitude, I had carried my hatred of oppression to extraordinary lengths. At that time [roughly 1928-1933] failure seemed to me to be the only virtue. Every suspicion of self-advancement, even to the extent of making a few hundreds a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of bullying.

The early Orwell’s stance could in a sense be read as the oh so predictable, immature rejection of bourgeois society by one of its more privileged members, who almost certainly only had a vague notion of what the word ‘bourgeois’ actually meant, and certainly hadn’t the faintest idea how things might actually be changed. Most such middle-class radicals end up being reabsorbed by the society they once supposedly despised. At best they become concerned journalists or perhaps panellists on The View. At worst they end their days thinking that Eoghan Harris has a point. But Orwell was clearly different. His rebellion was a serious one. It was this failure-worshipping stance that led Orwell to drift down among the tramps and winos of London and Paris. And from this milieu came the material for his first book Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933. By now his writing had greatly improved from those early, laughable efforts. The plain documentary prose style for which he became famous was already visible. Orwell was nothing if not persistent. In Ruth Pitter’s words: “he had the gift, he had the courage, he had the persistence to go on in spite of failure, sickness, poverty, and opposition”.
The three years that followed saw him produce a novel each year, Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). The most significant of these for us is probably Burmese Days, a damning anti-imperialist indictment of British colonial rule in Burma: something Orwell knew from the inside having spent five years working as a policeman for the British regime there. All of these novels deal with issues important to Orwell: repression, snobbery, hypocrisy, the worship of money and the frustration of artistic ambitions.
My personal favourite is Keep the Aspidistra Flying: his grim but often hilarious portrait of Gordon Comstock, a down-at-heel poet forever beset by financial embarrassment and sexual frustration. Comstock is obsessed with not being ruled by the “Money God”, and so leaves a well-paying job writing slogans for an advertising agency, and gets a badly-paying job in a bookshop. At least that way he has some hope of retaining his integrity. In the end, though, his girlfriend Dorothy becomes pregnant, and Comstock leaves the bohemian life behind; surrendering himself entirely to a future of Money, Marriage and Aspidistra Plants, all the things he previously spat venom at. Orwell’s portrait of Gordon Comstock is perhaps the last we see of his early, unfocussed radicalism. Keep the Aspidistra Flying was published in January 1936. By December of that year the Spanish civil war had broken out, and Orwell was in Barcelona fighting against the forces of General Franco as a member of the POUM militia.
Just after he’d finished Keep the Aspidistra Flying Orwell was commissioned by Victor Gollancz of the Stalinist-leaning Left Book Club to write a book of documentary non-fiction about the condition of the unemployed in the industrial north of England. Gollancz offered him an advance of £500, huge money for the time. This was the coincidence which finally pushed George Orwell to become the overtly political writer we have come to know. Years later his friend, Richard Rees, recalled: “There was such an extraordinary change both in his writing and, in a way also, in his attitude after he’d been to the North and written that book. I mean, it was almost as if there’d been a kind of fire smouldering in him all his life which suddenly broke into flame at that time.”
Of course, events external to Orwell’s day-to-day life played their part too. 1936 was the year when the political and economic crisis of the 1930s really began to seriously gather speed as it hurtled towards disaster and the second world war. In March of that year the German army moved into the previously demilitarised Rhineland: the first serious violation by Hitler of the Versailles Treaty. In May Italy invaded Abyssinia and Mussolini declared that a new Roman Empire had been established. In July General Franco’s forces rose up and tried to overthrow the Republican government in Spain. When they didn’t achieve the easy victory they’d expected, the Civil War began. In October Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts were beaten off the streets by anti-fascists at Cable Street as they tried to march through the predominantly Jewish areas of the East End of London. And in December the abdication of Edward VIII did its bit to heighten the sense of crisis.
When he asked Orwell to write the book that would become The Road to Wigan Pier, Victor Gollancz hoped Orwell would produce a book something like Down and Out in Paris and London, except that this time the focus would be industrial workers (both employed and unemployed) and their families, rather than tramps. What Orwell actually produced was a book of two very distinct halves: the first of which provides us with some of the best portraits to be found of working class life in 1930s England. For the first time Orwell begins to see working class people as human beings fully conscious of their own position at the bottom of society. He recalls watching a young woman trying to unblock a drain with a stick: “I thought how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling in the gutter in a back-alley in Wigan, in the bitter cold, prodding a stick up a blocked drain. At that moment she looked and caught my eye, and her expression was as desolate as I have ever seen; it struck me that she was thinking just the same thing I was.” Elsewhere, though, his view of working class life is just a little sentimental:

In a working-class home—I am not thinking at the moment of the unemployed, but of comparatively prosperous homes—you breath a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which is not so easy to find elsewhere.… on winter evenings when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in his shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits the other with her sewing, and the children with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the mat.

The picture Orwell paints of this happy, simple life is so idyllic that it sounds almost like something from a speech by Ronald Reagan or Éamon de Valera. I have to confess that whenever I actually come across people as apparently wholesome as this, I tend to suspect that they either have bodies buried under the patio, or that Father (God bless him) will in the fullness of time be escorted into the back of a police van with a bag over his head, having been caught bouncing the little ones on his knee just a little too vigorously.
The second part of The Road to Wigan Pier is a hilarious, if at times slightly cranky portrayal of the organised left of the time. On his way to attend the Independent Labour Party Summer School at Letchworth, Orwell spots two other likely attenders:

both about sixty, both very short, pink and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on the top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, and then, back at them again, and murmured, ‘Socialists’.

Orwell seems to have enjoyed the company of those working-class activists he met in the North of England. But he quite clearly detested those on the left he saw as middle-class trendies or frauds of any type:

‘Socialism’ calls up, on the one hand, a picture of aeroplanes, tractors and huge glittering factories of glass and concrete; on the other, a picture of vegetarians with wilting beards, of Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half gramophone), of earnest ladies in sandals, shock-haired Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control fanatics and Labour Party backstairs-crawlers. Socialism, at least in this island, does not smell any longer of revolution and the overthrow of tyrants; it smells of crankiness, machine-worship and the stupid cult of Russia. Unless you remove that smell, and very rapidly, Fascism may win.

Despite his scathing portrayal of much of the left, Orwell himself was nevertheless moving sharply to the left politically. In early December he put the finishing touches to The Road to Wigan Pier and made arrangements to travel to Spain, where the civil war was now raging. He arrived in Barcelona on 22 December and was greatly impressed by what he saw:

The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing.… Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flags of the Anarchists… Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Seňor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’.

His experience in Spain would lead Orwell to write what is arguably his best book, Homage to Catalonia. But during his time there, Orwell was more than merely another literary tourist: he fought and was shot and badly injured. It was Orwell’s personal experience of the role played by the Stalinists in undermining and ultimately sabotaging this revolution that turned his fairly vague suspicions about ‘the cult of Russia’ into an implacable hostility towards Stalinism, which he retained for the rest of his life. During the Russian-backed crackdown on ‘Trotsky-Fascist Fifth Columnists’ in June 1937 he himself was forced to go on the run, sleeping rough on the streets of Barcelona for several nights, to avoid being rounded up because of his membership of the anti-Stalinist POUM militia. His friend George Kopp was imprisoned and tortured by the Stalinists. The torture with rats of Winston Smith in Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-Four is apparently partly based on Kopp’s treatment at their hands. And yet despite this tragic outcome Orwell left Spain inspired with an impatient, nagging hope:

For months past we had been telling ourselves that ‘when we get out of Spain’ we would go somewhere beside the Mediterranean and be quiet for a little while and perhaps do a little fishing… It sounds like lunacy but the thing that both of us wanted was to be back in Spain. I have recorded some of the outward events, but I suppose I have failed to convey more than a little of what those months in Spain mean to me.… the mountain dawns stretching away into inconceivable distances, the frosty crackle of bullets, the roar and glare of bombs; the clear cold light of the Barcelona mornings, and the stamp of boots in the barrack yard, back in December when people still believed in the revolution…

I think it is fair to say that Orwell left Spain a convinced revolutionary socialist. Indeed he spent the next couple of years waiting for a revolution, which in the end didn’t come. His next novel Coming Up For Air (1939) is a portrait of George Bowling, “a fat insurance salesman worn down by a loveless marriage, the expense of a family, children who despise him”. Bowling is exactly the sort of beleaguered Mr Average that Orwell thought the left needed to appeal to if it was ever to successfully take power in Britain. The coalminers and the cranks would never be enough. A win on the horses inspires Bowling to leave home one day and try to recapture something of his youth:

Of course, his journey is doomed—the small town [where Bowling grew up] had been engulfed by suburbia and his woodland paradise infested with fruit juice drinking, nudist vegetarians, and Garden City cranks.… Katie, his childhood sweetheart is now a worn-out, middle-aged drab and the secret pool, the symbolic centre of his childhood fantasy, turned into a rubbish dump. The horrors of the mass society have overwhelmed the holy places and Doomsday threatens in the form of Hitler, Stalin and their streamlined battalions.… George returns to his bourgeois prison to face again his nagging wife and unlovable children.

Orwell had clearly moved a long way since the days when he believed that salvation could only be found down among penniless tramps. He was now thinking in concrete terms about how society might actually be changed, and socialism made to appeal to both the working and middle classes.
The two novels that followed before his premature death from TB in 1950 are what transformed him from a medium-sized 1930s figure into a literary superstar, whose books will no doubt still be read two hundred years from now. Animal Farm (1945) is an ingenious Swiftian satire on the Russian Revolution betrayed. Orwell has been accused by some of jumping on the Cold War bandwagon, and of allowing his work to be used by reactionaries and warmongers to attack the socialism which he himself believed in. It’s important to remember, though, that when Orwell was writing and trying to find a publisher for Animal Farm, the second world war was still on, and Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union were still allies. Orwell actually found it incredibly difficult to find a publisher for what was seen at the time as another trouble-making book by him. So the charge of opportunism really doesn’t stick. The later film version famously removed the last scene in which the animals peer in the window at the pigs and the humans having dinner together, and cannot see any difference between them. Orwell’s message that the Stalinist bureaucracy (represented by pigs) and the capitalist class (represented by the humans) were as bad as each other was no doubt a little inconvenient for the American cold war propagandists who hijacked his work. The manner in which life-long Soviet apparatchiks such as Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin managed to transform themselves into advocates of the gangster capitalism now prevalent in Russia shows that he was of course right: in the last analysis there was very little difference between them and the capitalist class in the west. They would do anything to hang onto their positions, up to and including the complete restoration of capitalism.
His last major work was Nineteen Eighty-Four, a deeply pessimistic portrait of a totalitarian society, resembling those that then existed in eastern Europe. By the time he wrote this book, Orwell had moved away from the near Marxist stance of Homage to Catalonia. His revolutionary moment had passed. And of course world events had moved on too. The second world war was over, and Britain now had a Labour government which Orwell basically supported. It was this Labour government—a government far to the left of that of Tony Blair—which created the National Health Service and the welfare state. By the time Orwell died in 1950, the political situation was completely different to that of 1936, the year he went to fight in Spain. Orwell had an instinctive rather than a theoretical attitude to politics. His contempt for theoreticians—”shock-haired Marxists chewing polysyllables”—led him to spend a lot of time reacting against other people’s ideas rather than coming up with credible ideas of his own.
The worst example of this is his stance in relation to World War II. In September 1938, during the Czechoslovakia crisis, Orwell published a short article in New Leader, the paper of the ILP, in which he stated: “We repudiate… all appeals to the people to support a war which would, in fact, maintain and extend imperialist possessions and interest, whatever the incidental occasion.” At the time the Stalinist parties where promoting the Popular Front policy. ‘Democracy not Fascism’ was the slogan, and they were desperate to build an alliance against Nazi Germany between the Soviet Union and western powers, such as Britain and France. When the war actually came both Orwell and the Stalinists did a complete about-turn. The Hitler-Stalin pact was signed and the Soviet Union stayed out of the war until it was attacked itself in 1941. The Communist Parties attacked the war as ‘imperialist’, just as Orwell had in his New Leader article. Orwell, on the other hand, strongly supported the war effort and vehemently attacked the anti-imperialist, anti-war point of view, which he himself had still supported as late as August 1939. He never properly explained this about-turn. A likely explanation is that, by then, his hatred of the Stalinists was so intense that when he heard them saying one thing, he would, if at all possible, say the opposite.
His hatred of all things Soviet was also his motivation when, on 2 May 1949, he sent a list of suspected Communists and fellow-travellers to the British intelligence services. The list included both literary figures such as Stephen Spender and J B Priestley, and left-wing Labour MPs such as Ian Mikardo and Tom Driberg. A number of the people named by Orwell were outed not just as suspected Communist sympathisers but also as homosexuals. Given that homosexual acts between men were still illegal in Britain, and would remain so for another twenty years, this was a particularly disgusting thing to have done. Orwell handed MI5 material which they would no doubt use to blackmail left-wingers and socialists. There is no excuse for this.
Despite his many faults, though, Orwell is a writer whose work will always be of interest to socialists, indeed to thinking people everywhere. Yes, he was often cranky, often wrong. But his dogged pursuit of some of the awkward questions of his time led him to produce two of the masterpieces of socialist literature, Homage to Catalonia and Animal Farm. And the bravery he showed in opposing Stalinism—not when it was weak and collapsing but at the height of its power—cannot be lightly dismissed. If this Orwell lived around the corner from me, he would be welcome to come around for a cup of tea anytime. No doubt we would argue. But such is life.


Red Banner magazine, June 2004

Copyright © Kevin Higgins 2012

Review:  Philip Coleman reviews Mentioning the War for The Stinging Fly, Summer 2012

Kevin Higgins’ interest in the performative and political aspects of poetic practice certainly owes something to the combined efforts of writers such as Galvin and Durcan before him, and the public impulse of his work is reinforced by the essays and shorter prose pieces collected in Mentioning the War: Essays and Reviews, 1999- 2011. As the title suggests, Higgins’ work—like Bardwell’s, in this respect—seeks to discuss things that are often not given broad or open coverage, and in this collection he writes with equal critical insight about literary as well as political matters, regardless of their current cultural status, currency, or standing. An essay on George Orwell is followed by a piece on elaine Feeney, which in turn gives way to reviews of books about the corrupt banker Seán Fitzpatrick and the Corrib gas pipeline controversy. Literary criticism and political/social commentary appear side by side in a book that demonstrates Higgins’ clear commitment to the value of the written word. Indeed, the contents of Mentioning the War are drawn from a diverse array of publications, including literary magazines and periodicals in Ireland, the uK, Canada, and Australia, but also from publications such as The Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society and the Albanian newspapers Ndryshe and Shekulli, demonstrating both the high regard with which Higgins’ work is held internationally and the transnational range and reach of his interests.

In an essay on the Russian poet marina Tsvetaeva’s prose, Joseph Brodsky wrote:

What does a writer of prose learn from poetry? The dependence of a word’s specific gravity on context, focused thinking, omission of the self-evident, the dangers that lurk within an elevated state of mind. And what does the poet learn from prose? Not much: attention to detail, the use of common parlance and bureaucratese, and, in rare instances, compositional know-how (the best teacher of which is music). All three of these, however, can be gleaned from the experience of poetry itself (especially from Renaissance poetry), and theoretically—but only theoretically—a poet can get along without prose.

Kevin Higgins, like Leland Bardwell, is a poet first and foremost, but he did not need to write prose to learn the things flagged here by Brodsky. His essays, like his poems, attend with great care to relevant details, just as his political and cultural observations are often informed by actual experience and insight. As he puts it in an interview included in this collection but first published in 2009: ‘The writers I am always interested in are those who see everything in the world as their subject, and ruthlessly write the truth as they see it, come what may. Far better to do this than become a yes man or woman for this or that popular front.’ The breadth of topics discussed in Mentioning the War, coupled with Higgins’ intelligence and candour as a social, cultural, and literary critic, make this an indispensable volume, not just to readers interested in contemporary Irish poetry but to anyone interested in the current political, cultural and social climate. Including illuminating introductory pieces by Darrell Kavanagh and John Goodby, Mentioning the War reproduces some of the work published in Higgins’ earlier volume Poetry, Politics & Dorothy Gone Horribly Astray (Lapwing Press, 2006). Like Bardwell’s Different Kinds of Love, however, the pieces reprinted here retain all of the urgency of their earlier occasions. A poet may get along without prose, but no reader interested in the state of contemporary Irish poetry or culture can afford to ignore the interventions made by Bardwell and Higgins in these very different but immensely valuable prose collections.

—Philip Coleman




Review: Mentioning the War: essays and reviews 1999-2011 reviewed by Joe Horgan for Books Ireland, Summer 2012 

As a poet I have a dark secret. It’s a problem I have when it comes to the reading of poetry. It’s not that I don’t read poetry or can’t. I do and I can. But I have to admit that the reading of a lot of contemporary poetry is something close to a chore. If I can just get to the end, I tell myself, I can read something else with a clear conscience. Too often, amongst the pages of poetry, I am overwhelmed by feelings of irrelevance. What the hell am I doing in the middle of this polite parlour game? Fortunately, though, there are poets that can be read with, even, as sense of anticipation and fortunately for me as a reviewer Kevin Higgins is one of these. In this book of essays we get to see just why that is so and get to see, beyond his essays, just why his poetry is so invigorating. Quite simply, the writings of Kevin Higgins manage to make poetry seem important.
This book is a collection of disparate essays and reviews and as with any collection there are a few fillers and some that are far better than others. Higgins is never going to let you get bored though and as a politically and poetically active artist has the great gift of stirring up your thoughts, with even the briefest of pieces leaving you with something to chew on. For reviewing the ludicrously underrated Ken Bruen he gained my admiration. For favourably reviewing Jonathan Fitzgibbon’s Cromwell’s Head, by far the silliest book I have ever reviewed, my bewilderment. For reviewing Paul Muldoon’s band, in particular his lyrics, my disagreement. Muldoon’s cleverness is neither daunting nor accessible, it’s just tedious. For his essay / critique of Red Lamp, my cringing laughter. Indeed his portrait of the poets at the start of the essay had me looking around the room in case he was suddenly pointing at me with a smirk.
Higgins is far too much an engaged and relevant writer though for this to be a book just for insiders, for poets to nod over together. The essay ‘Unmasking the Real Enemy’ is a brilliant piece of writing, whether you wish to call it political or social or whatever you’re having yourself, it is the writing, the writing that carries it. Which is where his strength lies, for however politically alert and concerned he is, however argumentative and contradictory, both as an essayist and as a poet, Higgins never loses sight of the fact that you better be able to say what you want to say, as well as being sure what it is you want to say. So whether you are agreeing or disagreeing with him you are never in doubt that you are involved with writing of the highest quality. For instance in his review of a Douglas Murray book extolling neo-conservatism I found myself profoundly disagreeing with him but unable to stop reading. Like quite a few of us on the disappointed, defeated left he can seem quite lost, quite often, and in his review of Murray’s book manifests that most profoundly. Appearing to follow the journalist Nick Cohen in having the old habit on the left of seeing the settling of scores with other factions on the left as a priority, his partial embracing of the neocons in this review is both a brave inclusion and an example of a mind in movement. Devil’s advocate is often the default position now for a left-wing writer and Higgins’s display of this works to his advantage, even when you sharply disagree with his position. But then what kind of work would be produced by an artist who doesn’t wish to wander into uncertainty, even of the most disconcerting kind? From poetry, through politics, to the personal, Kevin Higgins’s collection of essays will have you nodding in satisfied agreement, emphatically shaking your head in disagreement, laughing, cringing, and thinking. You’re not surely going to ask for much more than that, are you?




How do you go about reviewing or criticizing a book about reviews and criticism with out boring people or repetition, you don’t, you go down another route and ask yourself what has this book done for you and what could it do for a potential reader?

I'm a fan of books and authors who compile their essays, reviews and memoirs etc. together into one book for a particular reason and the same reason why you as a reader should purchase books in this category and that is quite simply, to educate yourself and come away learning about new things (in this case for me, writers and poets I had never heard of) also to have a laugh at someones expense and to cringe or get angry at the reviewers opinion.

Kevin Higgins is a well known clever and witty poet and also known for sharing his opinion honestly and as straightforward as a flying arrow. His new book launched by Salmon Poetry is Mentioning the War a collection of his best reviews and essays from 1999 up to 2011 and the book also includes a couple of intimate memoirs which are quite heartwarming and engaging.

When I attended a packed house for Kevin's book launch, I was unsure whether I would purchase a book that was mostly about the ranting a raving of politics, yet to my surprise, I picked up the book and the first page I opened was the review of 'The Lost World of Francis Ledwidge, The Ledwidge Treasury - Selected Poems' which coincidentally was the exact book I had in my bag, now there was a sign, so I purchased the book and dove in head first.

As expected, the book pulls punches and over the years Higgins has worn the gloves and let rip left and right. Through out the book his reviews are challenging yet informative with plenty of analysis on everything political and social and his views of left wing politics is where he is at his most critical and often wittiest.

For someone like myself who is Apolitical, I knew it would be a challenge to read and finish a book that is mostly based on political views and criticism, but as stated above, there is always a goal to reading books of this caliber and a reason why I always recommend books such as this, and it is in his book reviews and cultural discussions where you can benefit and indulge in unique knowledge and information Kevin can bring through his prose style writing and reviewing.

Take for instance, I am a huge fan of Asian poets, modern to classical, Japanese and Chinese, but I know nothing of South Korean writers or have ever read a poem by a Korean poet. In a review of AZALEA - Journal of Korean Literature & Culture you are opened in to a new world of poetry, fiction, essays and memoirs of Korean writers which lead me to surfing the net and been introduced to some fine new writers and on to Amazon for some book purchasing.

This is the case through out the book, a review of mainstream love hotel by Todd Swift, someone I had never heard of before was an inspiring read and another introduction to writers unknown in my little world.

Add the writer Visar Zhiti and his collection of poetry 'The Condemned Apple', a collection Higgins describes as 'the most disturbing collection of poetry I ever read' and with that said, you are already intrigued. Kevin brings to light, a poet born in the Soviet Union from the 1950s and gives the account and surrounding circumstances that Zhiti was trying to write and publish his first collection of poetry which makes for engaging intriguing reading.

The review is one of my favourite in this book and has introduced me yet again to another quite brilliant poet and again I await for my book delivery by Amazon.

There are plenty of excellent reviews here of Christopher Hitchens, Micheal D Higgins, David Solway, Maureen Gallagher and even Ruairi Quinn who feels the leather of the left hook and is described by Higgins hilariously here 'As a writer, he is dull beyond belief' and that is the mild mannered beginning of the review.

Though I admit is struggled through most of the political writings, it is in certain essays such as 'Culture and Recession' (the state of funding for the arts in Ireland) 'The Poetry Reading Escapes From The Victorian Drawing Room' ( an interesting must read on the debate about performance poetry and the growing movement in Ireland) and my favourite 'All Poetry's Children Under One Wide Roof' (his journey with his wife Susan in setting up the Over the Edge readings in Galway and the contribution it gives to the community) are all essays that need to be read and enjoyed.

Reading essays by Higgins such as the examples above are necessary, inspiring, educational and will leave you thinking for the day. This book is highly recommended due to the wide selection of topics and the wit and bite of Higgins with his straightforward honesty. As I said, use this book to laugh, to cringe, to scream 'Did he really say that' to be informed, educated but also to get to know the writer and poet Kevin Higgins.

His first two essay/memoirs 'Back Home To Ireland' and 'And No One Knew His Name', though they sort of stick out like a sheep amongst a pack of wolves, are remarkably intimate and personally engaging, stories about the poets mother and his childhood which are both touching and inspiring. 'And No One Knew His Name' made me think of my own childhood, growing up as a boy in North Dublin and inspired me to pen my own memoir/short story.

There really is a lot going on in 'Mentioning the War' that you as a reader will be most pleasantly satisfied, opinions you may agree or disagree with, that could have you enraged or enthralled, either way you will enjoy this book and come away with knowledge and opinions of your own. I highly recommend this book, and that’s coming from an Apolitical couldn't care less about politics man but sure, there you go.

Other Titles from Kevin Higgins

Contact us

Salmon Poetry / The Salmon Bookshop
& Literary Centre,
Main Street,
Ennistymon,
County Clare,
V95 XD35,
Ireland

Newsletter
Arts Council
Credit Cards