Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

"Time Gentlemen Please" by Kevin Higgins
Salmon Poetry €12.00

Kevin Higgins’ second collection follows on from the success of his first with more striking, surprising and cuttingly observed work. To take an example from ‘Foreboding’:

the future’s about to leap at you
like a baboon with a hatchet
from a man-hole or a closet, screaming

That image, for me, sums up more eloquently than a review can do, what it is that makes Kevin Higgins really good. It’s difficult, when so much has already been said, to avoid trotting out the old clichés: satirical, caustic, Larkin-esque. Yes, Higgins is all those, but what sometimes gets missed in all the discussion about content and tone, is the craft that underpins these poems. The images are surprising, infused with humour and accuracy. Each line is measured to Higgins’ breath worked so the break occurs always on the strong word. The use of rhyme is usually subtle and backgrounded so that it seems almost accidental or incidental to the poem, but assonance, alliteration, and various types of half and off-rhyme are present none the less. Take for example the lines below from ‘The Doctor’s Waiting Room’:

Your road rage face
strategic tears and apologies always
like artificial Los Angeles snow.
Hate him, breathless and red faced as ever.
You taking the world warmly by the throat.

Look closely and as well as assonances on ‘snow’ and ‘throat’, and ‘breathless’ and ‘ever’, ‘face’and ‘always’, there are various alliterative groupings and echoes on Rs, Ts, Ws and Hs. Higgins is an accomplished performer of his work, a winner of several major slams, and this aspect of his work should not be understated when discussing his work. Indeed, the page never tells all the story with Higgins and to make the poems really live, you have to hear Higgins deliver them.

Higgins takes us on a grand tour of his world in this book, there are elements of the bathetic in Higgins’ wasteland, just as there are in Eliot’s (and the title of the book is, I think, intended to point to the connection between them). Higgins ventriloquises several voices in this book, most of them acerbic; none of them repentant. He turns his invective against several targets, political and social in the main, with the Socialist movement being a favourite. Some of the poems address dysfunctional relationships, especially that favourite among Irish writers, the father – son problem. Yet Higgins is not afraid to poke fun at himself on occasion either as in ‘This Small Obituary’:

Your next-door neighbour will vaguely remember me,
when some hypocrite writes this small obituary:
“He had a real knack for last lines
but fell in love with his own invective
became such an expert at cutting throats
that, in the end, he slit his own.”

Once or twice, the book could have done with a little tighter editorial eye, sometimes the same image recurs in too close proximity – for instance, clearly there is some fascination with three-bar fires, which occur in at least three poems, two of which are very close together. Perhaps they hold some symbolic association for Higgins, and are connected with the ‘sad man in the caravan’ who he says ‘keeps coming back’, but there appears to be a variety of association. The three-bar fire is used in symbolic nourishment where bread is toasted on it. It is next used as a symbol of rundown Bohemian chic, and thirdly as a way of describing sexual heat. Each image works in its own poem, but perhaps within the same book the repeated use is a little obtrusive.

That said, one tends to forgive Higgins his minor transgressions because the work is so joyously dark and funny. He is the only one of my Irish contemporaries who makes me laugh out loud regularly, not just because the work is funny, but because it has that great sense of character behind it, where one pictures the speaker in all his curmudgeonly grumpy-oldman-ness glaring at the reader wondering what the hell they’re laughing at!