Jiving with Wasps

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 chisms: 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's Brendan O'Connor Show. Her 2026 Bloodaxe retrospective, Jiving with Wasps: New & Selected Poems draws on all of these. 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 is a member of Aosdána.

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.