When You Came Home This Evening
When You Came Home This Evening
Love, your hat was a toothpaste top
unscrewed to reveal hair
crazier than your mother.
Your nose was a sick baby Robin
and your knees two creaking floorboards.
Your face was a graveyard
just after the funeral
and your stomach
grumbled like Chernobyl.
You discarded your bra
to let your breasts argue
with each other and stood there
looking like something dragged in
by a very discriminating cat
who, when I find him, I’ll thank
with waterfall loads of salmon
and all the ham in Shanghai
for delivering you
to this and no other
door.
Kevin Higgins facilitates poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre; teaches creative writing at Galway Technical Institute and on the Brothers of Charity Away With Words programme. He is also Writer-in-Residence at Merlin Park Hospital and the poetry critic of the Galway Advertiser. He was a founding co-editor of The Burning Bush literary magazine. His first collection of poems The Boy With No Face was published by Salmon in February 2005 and was short-listed for the 2006 Strong Award. His second collection, Time Gentlemen, Please, was published in March 2008 by Salmon. One of the poems from Time Gentlemen, Please, ‘My Militant Tendency’, featured in the Forward Book of Poetry 2009. His work also features in the anthology Identity Parade - New British and Irish Poets (Ed Roddy Lumsden, Bloodaxe, 2010). Frightening New Furniture is his third collection of poems and was published in 2010 by Salmon Poetry. Kevin has read his work at most of the major literary festivals in Ireland and at Arts Council and Culture Ireland supported poetry events in Kansas City, USA (2006), Los Angeles, USA (2007), London, UK (2007), New York, USA (2008), Athens, Greece (2008); St. Louis, USA (2008), Chicago, USA (2009), Denver, USA (2010), Washington D.C (2011), Huntington, West Virginia, USA (2011), Geelong, Australia (2011) & Canberra, Australia (2011). As part of his Culture Ireland supported trip to Chicago in February 2009 he participated in and took first place in a specially arranged poetry slam at the Chicago’s Green Mill Bar and Lounge, the birthplace of slam poetry. Kevin’s fourth collection of poetry, The Ghost In The Lobby, will be published by Salmon Poetry in 2013. Kevin is co-organiser of Over The Edge literary events. His next book, Mentioning The War, a collection of his essays and reviews will be published by Salmon this April.
Mentioning The War - essays and reviews (1999-2011) by Kevin Higgins published April 7th, 2012 by Salmon
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.
Blue doors in Smithfield provided courtesy of Claire Wilson who blogs as Gingerpixel.
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