Poetry Book Society Special Commendation
Jiving with Wasps is a new retrospective from Ireland's Rita Ann Higgins drawing on a dozen books of poetry published over four decades, from Goddess on the Mervue Bus (1986) to The Long Weekend (2024), in addition to new poems appearing here for the first time. These are provocative and heart-warming poems of high jinks and telling social comment by a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of Irish lives and foibles. Defiantly mischievous, playfully subversive, this irreverent iconoclast has been achieving even wider popularity through her regular appearances on RTÉ's Brendan O'Connor Show: 'Rita Ann Higgins is the people's poet. She's magic. She's a one-off.'
Jiving with Wasps: New & Selected Poems updates Rita Ann Higgins’ two previous Bloodaxe retrospectives Sunny Side Plucked (1996) and Throw in the Vowels (2005), including substantial selections from the earlier collections included in those with the addition of poems from her later collections Ireland Is Changing Mother (2011) and Tongulish (2016) from Bloodaxe; Hurting God (2010), Our Killer City (2018) and Pathogens Love a Patsy (2020) from Salmon; The Long Weekend (Gill, 2024), poems read on RTÉ's Brendan O'Connor Show; and a generous selection of new, previously uncollected poems.
‘Rita Ann Higgins’s Jiving with Wasps: New & Selected Poems – a 350-page cornucopia of wit, wisdom, challenge and tenderness – represents four decades of output from one of Ireland’s major writers. Offering generous selections from her 11 collections to date and a pamphlet-length set of new poems, this publication demonstrates the extraordinary psychological insight, moral depth and social vision of a body of writing that puts human vulnerability, resilience and responsibility front and central stage. Jiving with Wasps allows us to track the evolution of this multi-tongued poet’s inimitable poetic style. Higgins’s voice – acutely alert to the strange within the familiar – communicates through unrivalled command of tonal nuance in polysemous verbal play. Plain-spoken anecdotal reportage and reflection is charged with multilevel meaning through this poet’s unerring ear for tragicomic timing. […] Jiving with Wasps presents an indispensable mirror to death-dealing cultures of neglect and abuse. By also communicating the basis of effective resistance to them in compassion, solidarity and willingness to confront self-deception, this book is required – and hugely stimulating – reading.’ – Catríona Clutterbuck, The Irish Times
‘Higgins has always been a poet with a distinctive stance, never shirking her responsibilities as a public voice speaking on behalf of those who do not possess such a platforms. She is… both jocular and jugular, two traits that combine to make her a singular voice in Irish poetry… Passion and conviction walk hand-in-hand in these poems.’ – Gerard Smyth, Poetry Ireland Review, on Tongulish
‘Rita Ann Higgins’ Tongulish continued to show this artful, innovative poet taking liberties with the language, her disenchanted politics matched with an enchanter’s way with words…’ – John McAuliffe, The Irish Times (Poetry Books of the Year)
‘Tongulish, her 11th book of poetry, finds Higgins as intensively inventive and deliciously subversive as ever… The rebellious, innovative Higgins is one of his [James Joyce’s] distinctive heirs. Like Joyce, she knows just how to beat up the English language and her use of mythology, Irish language and Ireland’s past put her own inimitable stamp on her bang up-to-date present.’ – Martina Evans, The Irish Times
‘Five years ago Rita Ann Higgins released Ireland Is Changing Mother, a poetry collection that doubled as a state-of-the-nation address. A call to arms and a hugely enjoyable read, it was an astute powerhouse of carefully chosen words that confirmed Higgins as one of Ireland’s great living poets. Tongulish, her 10th collection, is the follow-up… Tongulish features her trademark wit and warmth, while choosing to cast an eye towards private, domestic worlds and matters of communication… If Ireland is Changing Mother was the boom and bust, then Tongulish is the return to order.’ – Eithne Shortall, Sunday Times Ireland
‘... a voice of furious social engagement. There are many personal, indeed startlingly intimate, poems in Higgins' various volumes, but she takes a particular glee in skewering the pomposities and hypocrisies of establishment Ireland and she's moved to withering anger about the injustices perpetrated on those whom the state has treated with cruel disregard… it's not hard to see why herself [Rita Ann Higgins] and Paul Durcan have a following among people who otherwise feel intimidated by contemporary verse.’ – John Boland, Irish Independent, on Tongulish
‘Higgins has a talent for tuning into our everyday lives, making the ordinary border on the epic, suggesting something more sinister from the ostensibly mundane… Her language is rooted in the vernacular. She could be called the people’s poet.' – Colette Sheridan, Irish Examiner, on Tongulish
‘It shouldn't be unusual to hear a smart, sassy, unabashed, female working-class voice in Irish writing. But it is. Higgins's achievement doesn't depend on that rarity value, but it is certainly amplified by it. Higgins is, quite consciously, an artistic outsider... a unique fusion of wry, deadpan humour on the one side and absolute sincerity on the other. She doesn't congratulate herself for her sympathy with those who are (in this case literally) outside the world of art. She simply sees and writes. Her humour and playfulness keep sentimentality and self-righteousness resolutely at bay... She has made what is still the most direct and powerful statement of the class divide in Irish society... The boom years had no great effect on Higgins's voice, on her point of view or on her style. She had a manic linguistic energy long before the hysteria of the Tiger era quickened the pulse of the culture as a whole: Higgins could be regarded, in one of her guises, as Ireland's first rapper… Her political satire hasn't lost its edge, but it no longer reads as a cry in the wilderness... Now the bubble's burst, we're left with our real treasures, and Rita Ann Higgins is one of them.' – Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times, on Ireland Is Changing Mother
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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.
