Full Description
Jiving with Wasps is a new retrospective from 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.'
Contents
from GODDESS ON THE MERVUE BUS (1986)
14 Consumptive in the Library
15 Evangeline
17 Mrs McEttigan
18 Tommy's Wife
19 Unnecessary Work
20 Work On
21 The Apprentices
22 Goddess on the Mervue Bus
23 Lizzie Kavanagh
24 The German for Stomach
25 Almost Communication
26 Middle-aged Irish Mothers
28 Ode to Rahoon Flats
29 The Long Ward
30 God-of-the-Hatch Man
32 Mona
33 Sunny Side Plucked
from WITCH IN THE BUSHES (1988)
37 It's All Because We're Working-Class
38 She Is Not Afraid of Burglars
39 It Wasn't the Father's Fault
40 The Did-You-Come-Yets of the Western World
42 Old Soldier
43 Witch in the Bushes
46 Anything Is Better than Emptying Bins
47 End of a Free Ride
48 Woman's Inhumanity to Woman
49 The Blanket Man
50 No Balls at All
52 Some People
from PHILOMENA'S REVENGE (1992)
55 God Dodgers Anonymous
57 Every Second Sunday
57 Him and His Terrier
58 Reading
60 Philomena's Revenge
61 Misogynist
62 The Deserter
63 Light of the Moon
65 Old Timers
67 His Shoulder-blades and Rome
68 Between Them
70 He Leaves the Ironing-board Open
71 It's Platonic
71 Limits
74 Rat-like Dogs and Tattooed Men
75 New York
76 H-Block Shuttle
79 Trapped Doctor on Cork to Galway Bus
81 The Power of Prayer
83 Jackdaw Jaundice
83 I Want to Make Love to Kim Basinger
from HIGHER PURCHASE (1996)
88 The Flogger
90 He Could Get Radio Prague
91 Donna Laura
93 Higher Purchase
94 When the Big Boys Pulled Out
95 The Flute Girl's Dialogue
97 The Trouble with Karen Reilly
98 Mothercare
99 The Quarrel
101 Remapping the Borders
102 Mamorexia
102 The Taxi Man Knows
104 When It Comes to the Crutch
106 Gretta's Hex
108 Prism
108 Spiked
from AN AWFUL RACKET (2001)
112 Bare Bones
113 Soft as Putty
114 You'd Know He Had a Lovely Mother
116 Pater
116 For Crying our Loud
118 Anthem
119 Our Mothers Die On Days Like This
120 The Weather Beaters
121 The Fracture
123 The Clemson Experience
125 They Always Get Curried Chips
128 The Lads Said He Was a Sissy
129 April Fool's Day in Jerusalem
130 Lucky Mrs Higgins
131 Our Brother the Pope
133 Hey Greggie
134 City Slicker
134 My Face Goes Scarlet
135 He Knows About Cars
137 The Sentence
138 They Never Wear Coats
140 The Visionary
141 An Awful Racket
143 Succubus and Her Sisters
144 Black Dog in My Docs Day
149 They Never Clapped
154 The Jugglers
from THROW IN THE VOWELS (2005)
160 Ambrose Had a Big Heart
161 After Dinner Speaker
163 The Liberator
163 Wasting Time
165 The Servers
166 The Cover-up
168 Grandchildren
168 Anto's Inferno
170 The Real Mourners
171 Fugued
172 Throw in the Vowels
173 They Had No Song
174 Dry-mouthed and Melancholy
176 His i's Were Empty
177 The Hedger
178 Return to Sender
from IRELAND IS CHANGING MOTHER (2011)
183 Ireland Is Changing Mother
185 He Was No Lazarus
186 Guilty
187 His Brazen Hair
189 Spectre
188 The Darkness
192 No Pity for Polyneices
193 Malaga O'Malaga
195 Houdini
196 The Builder's Mess
197 O Sole Mio
198 The Fates
199 Chinese Notebook
200 Visiting My Father at Christmas
203 Nearly Falling
204 This Was No Ithaca
206 Ping
207 The Pledge
208 The Immortals
209 Fahrenheit
210 Edict
211 Borders
211 The Púca
212 Hasta Libido Baby
213 No One Mentioned the Roofer
214 Tongued and Grooved
from TONGULISH (2016)
216 The Middle Man
218 No End to the Amulets
219 Costa Del Dento
220 Mr Grave Offence
222 Shades of Truth
223 At Sea
225 The Gathering
226 Sinner
227 Caligula
229 My Claudius
231 Tongulish
232 An Octave Higher
233 A Field Day
234 Mirage
236 Spell
236 Pig Iron
237 The Party
238 Morsus
238 Glimpse
239 Chaste
239 The Odd Wasp
241 Primula Vulgaris
242 Audition
243 Testimony
245 Cryanair
248 While the Ear Worm Fiddled
249 The Search
250 She's Easy
251 Whack
252 The Carer
255 The Mission
259 The Bottom Lash
260 The Extra Second
261 Flight
263 The Women of 1916
264 The Camp
from OUR KILLER CITY (2018)
267 The Long-tired Memory
268 He Sings Happy Songs
269 They Trespass Against Us
270 It Suits a Narrative
272 No One Ever Kisses You
273 Our Killer City
277 Jiving with Wasps
from PATHOGENS LOVE A PATSY (2020)
I Pandemic Poems
280 I Must Wash Down the Banister
282 Cocoonery
283 Even the Con Artist Weeds
285 Pathogens Love a Patsy
287 Knee Deep in NPHET
289 A Beacon from Mars
291 A Few Morsels for the Mortals
293 Keep the R-Rate Down
294 Nothing Is Random
II Poems of Isolation
297 from I'm Hanna Greally
III Poems Before Covid
301 Homage
302 Scullery
303 Mimic
304 Sanctus
306 Tooth and Nail
306 Proof
308 He Fell through the Cracks
310 Oughterard-ery
from THE LONG WEEKEND (2024)
312 I Thought I Saw Saint Brigid Today
313 Coming Out of Winter
314 The Alphabet of Trees
315 Saint Patrick's Day
317 My Mother Loved Me in Red
318 The Bees Are Coming
319 The Eyes Have It
321 I Liked My Father at Halloween
322 All Saints' Day
323 All Souls' Day
324 The Valley of Disappointment
325 Pleione
326 Sacred as a Sepulchre
327 Saint Stephen's Day
NEW POEMS (2026)
330 Celsius
331 Pandora's Cousins
332 Appetiser
332 Renvyle Swim
333 MRI
333 The Children of Gaza
334 Cicero
335 The Lonely Scanner
336 Unnatural Pleasures
338 The Gold Flake Gang
339 King Crab
340 Never Let the Light In
341 The Holding Pen
343 Anomalies and Homilies
345 Hector the Vector Is Living Next Door
347 Shop Around
349 Endgame
