Rita Ann Higgins is a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of Irish lives and foibles who writes provocative and heart-warming poems of high jinx, jittery grief and telling social comment, mischievous and playful in their portrayal of feckless folk and outcasts, flirts and weasels, gasbags and scallywags. Giving readings throughout the country, and appearing on radio and TV shows, she became the laureate of the Irish dispossessed and disregarded, before as well as since the demise of the Celtic tiger, firstly through the poems from books included in THROW IN THE VOWELS: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (2005), and latterly with two Celtic zeitgeist collections, IRELAND IS CHANGING MOTHER (2011) and TONGULISH (2016).

Born in 1955 in Galway, where she still lives, she left school at 14, and was in her late 20s when she started writing poetry. She has since published eleven books of poetry, five with Bloodaxe and six with her first publisher, Salmon Poetry. THROW IN THE VOWELS was reissued in 2010 with an audio CD of her reading her poems. She has written several plays, and is is a member of Aosdána.

Neil Astley filmed Rita Ann reading a selection of her poems at her home in Ballybane, Galway, in April 2012. In this extract she reads ten poems: ‘God-of-the-Hatch Man’, ‘The Did-You-Come-Yets of the Western World’, ’Some People’, ‘An Awful Racket’, ‘Grandchildren’ and ‘It’s Platonic’ from THROW IN THE VOWELS, and ‘Tongued and Grooved’, ‘He Was No Lazarus’, ‘No One Mentioned the Roofer’ and ‘Ireland Is Changing Mother’ from IRELAND IS CHANGING MOTHER. This film is from the DVD-anthology IN PERSON: WORLD POETS, filmed and edited by Pamela Robertson-Pearce and Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2017). For more information see [ Ссылка ]

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