Event Details

Dates

16/09/2011 – 16/09/2011

The Galway Arts Centre would like to invite you to attend the Galway launch of Ireland Is Changing Mother by Galway poet Rita Ann Higgins

Friday September 16th, 6pm, The Galway Arts Centre, 47 Dominick Street.

The collection will be officially launched by comedian Tommy Tiernan.

Wine reception provided, all are welcome.

IRELAND IS CHANGING MOTHER

Ireland Is Changing Mother is the latest collection from

Rita Ann Higgins: provocative and heart-warming

poems of high jinx, 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.

 ‘Rita Ann Higgins writes a poetry in which anger is

transformed into irony, social comment into

wordplay. Hers is an unstoppable intelligence, which

comes off the page in a swirl of humour, deprecation

and observation’ – FIONA SAMPSON, Irish Times

 ‘A brilliantly spiky, surreal blend of humour and social

issues. Her poems are a witty mix of the erotic and

the upfront political from a female perspective, with

wonderful rhythms that effortlessly incorporate

direct speech’ – RUTH PADEL, Independent on Sunday

 ‘A quite untameable poet. Higgins roams the provincial

towns and countryside of Ireland fomenting rebellion

and writing with unstaunchable energy of everything

warm and unrespectable in Irish life. Her voice is like

nobody else’s, simple but not naive, raucous but

sympathetic’ – PETER PORTER, PBS Bulletin

 ‘Higgins’s voices are so distinctive and real that a

whole world of semi-rural Irish poverty rises around

the reader with the jolting acuity of an excellent

documentary…an hilarious, absorbing and thoroughly

disturbing experience’ – KATE CLANCHY, Independent

‘Rita Ann Higgins means a unique line in human

warmth; and a unique colour of humour and a

unique clarity’ – PAUL DURCAN

RITA ANN HIGGINS

Biography:

RITA ANN HIGGINS was born in 1955

in Galway, where she still lives. One of

13 children, she left school at 14, and

was in her late 20s when she started

writing poetry. She has since published

nine books of poetry, including Sunny

Side Plucked (1996), which was a Poetry

Book Society Recommendation, An

Awful Racket (2001) and Ireland Is

Changing Mother (2011) from Bloodaxe,

and Hurting God: Prose & Poems (2010)

from Salmon. First published in 2005,

her Bloodaxe retrospective Throw in

the Vowels: New & Selected Poems was

reissued in 2010 with an audio CD of

her reading her poems.