Ireland Is Changing Mother - Softcover

Rita Ann Higgins

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852249056 ISBN 13: 9781852249052

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2011

Synopsis

Ireland Is Changing Mother is Rita Ann Higgins at her edgy best: provocative and heart-warming poems of high jinks, jittery grief and telling social comment by a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of the lives of the Irish dispossessed, before as well as since the demise of the Celtic tiger. This was her first new collection after her 2005 retrospective, Throw in the Vowels.

Rita Ann Higgins’ retrospective Jiving with Wasps: New & Selected Poems, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, was published in March 2026. This updates her two previous Bloodaxe retrospectives Sunny Side Plucked (1996) and Throw in the Vowels (2005), including substantial selections from the earlier collections included in those books with the addition of poems from her later Bloodaxe collections Ireland Is Changing Mother (2011) and Tongulish (2016).

About this title

About the Author

Rita Ann Higgins was 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 many books of poetry and prose, including Sunny Side Plucked (Poetry Book Society Recommendation) (1996), An Awful Racket (2001), Throw in the Vowels: New & Selected Poems (2005), Ireland Is Changing Mother (2011) and Tongulish (2016) from Bloodaxe; Hurting God: Prose & Poems (2010), Our Killer City: isms, chisms, chasms and schisms: essays and poems (2018) and Pathogens Love a Patsy: Pandemic & Other Poems (2020) from Salmon; and The Long Weekend (Gill, 2024), poems read on RTÉ 1's Brendan O'Connor Show. Drawing on all of these as well as on later work, her retrospective, Jiving with Wasps: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2026), is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her appearances on the Brendan O'Connor Show during and since the pandemic earned her even wider popularity in Ireland – reading her poems to audiences of over 400,000 on the weekend shows – with O'Connor calling her 'the people's poet'.

Her plays include Face Licker Come Home (1991), God of the Hatch Man (1992), Colie Lally Doesn’t Live in a Bucket (1993), Down All the Roundabouts (1999), The Plastic Bag (2008), The Empty Frame (2008) and The Colossal Longing of Julie Connors (2014). Her many awards include a Peadar O’Donnell Award in 1989, the Living Poets Society Award in 2021, and several Arts Council bursaries. She has held prison workshops in Ireland and the UK, and is a member of Aosdána. She is an Ireland Reads Ambassador, serving in 2025 and 2026.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1852249056
• ISBN 13: 9781852249052
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 72