When Cleopatra rolled
Out of the rug, she thought:
Don’t worry! Even if
I do not enjoy your performance,
You will enjoy mine—a lot.
I’d like to credit myself
As an actress, but the truth
About men is: I’ve yet
To meet one unwilling
To believe he is a singularly
Exceptional lover—yeah, baby.
I am your captain aboard the Beguile,
Cruising down that long denial
With no wish to make things
Worse by undeceiving
You—mm, hail Caesar—
I offer half-lidded eyes and
All the right sounds at all
The right times and rely
On the fact that truly
What you pay close attention to
(Unduly) is yourself. You’re watching
Me, but it’s astounding—genuinely—
What you won’t see, though you should— There, right there, that’s good.
Charming, cunning queen, lay the tracks,
Set the stage and land the scene. He’ll believe
Because he wants to—oh, I want you—
And yet you’ll wish that you’d stayed home—
It wasn’t worth the trip to Rome.
– O how could I order that tuna and chips, – And sip my beer and gaze at yachts and cruise ships
Beyond the tops of changing booths and beach umbrella tips;
– And glimpse and catch the sea’s soughing of old truths – Through exhaled smoke of bronze Italian youths
And cries of a fat child a made-up plastic granny soothes;
– And not think of a Romantic poet’s pyre, – Or Claude’s Seaport, which Turner set on fire, Or brine-drenched heroes Neptune saved from Aeolus and Juno’s ire.
– But I confess it took an old tourist’s poem, – And my desire to make his tercets my own,
For me to see this sea transcending our own and Aeneas’ Rome.
– When we were on our way down here through Nice – We saw b-boys do flares, headspins, then freeze.
On Friday nights the promenade is checked by Finance Police.
– But all the while, at the sandy edge of sight, – On feathery legs of old, gods roll from the night,
And we would sense them could we still perform the proper rite.
“There will not be a woman Prime Minister in my lifetime”, Margaret Thatcher
The morning sun falls whitely on
the lashes of Lucy Kryton.
Her blondeness fully insured
against theft, fire
and termites. Her forehead
the hard reality
that care of both
the elderly and the daft
are best handled
by entrepreneurs.
Her navy dress
an incentive scheme for foreign investors.
Her compassion, a teenager taught failure
to honour thy father and mother leads
to a wet sleeping bag in a doorway
the government won’t be
rescuing you from. She knows
hard cases make bad exceptions,
of which she’ll be making none;
that for many people in this country
slavery and the right
of Nigerian taxi drivers
to marry each other
are issues of conscience
which transcend politics.
Her fiscal policy is dampness moving
down other people’s walls.
The finest mind
to come out of that part of Claremorris
in a long time. Her Ireland of the future
is an auld fella with a wig
at Mass on a Monday
somewhere in Mayo,
as the evening sun bounces savagely
off the achievements of Lucy Kryton,
the day the laughter suddenly stops
and she’s all that there is.
Kevin Higgins’s sixth poetry collection under the sardonic title Ecstatic starts with a dedication to the recently married Julian and Stella Assange, and this initial gesture is a perfect set-up for the poetic world we are about to enter.
Prepare to be disillusioned, experience embarrassment for your government, mourn the death of journalism (and common sense at large), only to get to the core of the human condition and be inspired to choose love over gold, fear and power.
Ecstatic is your reality check and a test to face the truth, however ugly, without a flinch. Just like a wedding ceremony in a London high-security prison, in Higgins’s poems our life becomes a celebration of humour, devotion and the beautiful mundane in confinement of global politics and oppressive social circumstances.
The collection opens with the figurative lines: ‘The dread of being together / forcing us back to sleep’. And from there we are continuously forced to wake up and examine the world, look attentively at things that disconnect us, even if it is painful.
This book is asking the reader to question not just their biased views, but the nature of thinking itself.
Kevin Higgins is the Daniel Kahneman of poetry, human behavior and judgement are scrutinized through the lens of his uncompromising language. Sharp as a razorblade, not a line missing, his poems are full of what could be idiomatic phrases but are actually invented by the author: ‘no one hates Holocaust denial more / than the old woman who runs a bed and breakfast / five miles from Auschwitz.’
These harsh truths could be overheard in an honest conversation between two old friends in a local pub, but instead they are now made available to a large audience of readers. We are dealing with the author brave and authentic enough to balance on the edge and take the risks to preserve the integrity of true art, so rare in our conformist times.
Occasionally, it leaves you wondering if the expressions so easily coined all throughout the collection have always been part of colloquial speech, which might be the highest achievement for a poet. Being so close to the vernacular, that at times their voice is hardly distinguishable from that of the people.
That being said, while perfectly attuned to the national discourse, Kevin’s poetry remains culturally multi-layered and intellectually challenging, often metaphysical. With the focus on Higgins’s signature ruthless satire, this collection will make you laugh, bitterly and loudly, and you will hate yourself for it.
Immune to inertia, his wit will keep you on your toes. From absurdist poems verging on the surrealist aesthetic (‘Not time yet / to commit suicide again…’) to the beautifully shameless and staggeringly funny erotica (‘Her spine is a repossessed grand piano / you still play to yourself in your sleep’), this eclectic collection covers a surprisingly broad range of subjects. Its structure develops from the specific to the general, as an extensive metaphor for inductive reasoning.
We are allowed to take a peek at images of personal history, masterfully conveyed childhood memories in Coventry, 1973; share private yet universal grief for lost friendships; embrace the inevitability of aging and sickness; and tenderly reflect on how our lovemaking changes as we grow older.
Via the domesticity made precious and exhilarating, this collection teaches us to be vulnerable and aware of how fragile we are and how little time we have left.
What gives it a special depth are incredibly lyrical poems with the mental imagery of lungs and breath, trees and leaves. Together they create an almost therapeutic effect, like a blues song that helps relieve emotional tension.
This sublime landscape of a rich individual inner experience comes in stark contrast to the social and environmental issues explored further on, and the entire poetic impulse of the book erupts into an anti-war, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial sequence concluding with a merciless poem called ‘Past’ that can be read to relate to both a particular life and the chronicle of humanity.
As a poet, on a personal and societal level Higgins is fighting the battle that can’t be won, and he knows it. Nonetheless, this is his job and Kevin proceeds with courage and self-irony to expose hypocrisy in ourselves and our communities.
In ‘Serial Killer Dies’ we are once again reminded of the corrupt nature of any government and our suicidal tendency to let the psychopaths in power decide our destiny; there is no hesitation in it to call things what they are.
Many poignant lines from other poems will stuck with the reader for long and will be widely quoted without doubt, such as ‘someone dies of politically necessary starvation’, or the tragically accurate commentary on the George Nkencho’s resonating case: ‘coming at Gardai with a chemical imbalance, / what some people are calling a machete / and a totally inappropriate post code…’.
For me, as a Russian-born Irish resident, who writes in English, Ecstatic offered consolation and understanding, as well as leading me to acceptance of the familiar world crumbling down time and time again.
I spent my childhood on Coventry Street in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), which is no longer twinned with the English city over the current Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Now that those links of solidarity are gone due to the psychotic unjustified actions of one man (and criminal complicity of others), severing an eighty-year connection of two hero cities heavily bombed during the Second World War along with thousands of innocent Ukrainian lives, Kevin Higgins’ sixth collection emphasizes even more that there is so much in common between ordinary people of different nationalities and such an unthinkable abyss between us and the ruling class.
The lies and agendas we are buying into, the false narratives and propaganda imposed on us are always a mass product, whereas ‘Truth is a paper-cut / no one but you knows is there.’
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Rotten fruit, rotten root. Hands up
Don’t shoot. Kyrie eleison.
By the waters of Columbine, of
Blacksburg, of Newtown, by the
Waters of Parkland and Uvalde,
There I sat down beneath my desk
(Don’t shoot) to weep. Christe eleison. My soul to take. Kyrie eleison. My soul to keep.
Gloria
There is no
No utterable Gloria In excelsis Deo—there is
Only the unutterable.
There is He, qui tollis Peccata mundi, but also
He that brings them, and
Brings them so
Unutterably.
Credo
“Of all things visible and invisible
The rifle is king. I believe
In one gun, in One Gun Almighty.
How fast can you run?” Thus
Spake Death, and these, even
These are the conditions in which Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum.
Sanctus
Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth!
And precious in His sight the
Little children He bid come.
Stop of the mouths of your
War machines this hour—
Strike them dumb. Let
Heaven and earth be full
Of their silence, lest every
Hosanna perish in violence.
Agnus Dei
Agnus Dei, who takes away
The sin of the world, what
Can it profit the Most High
If you take our sin but leave us
To die? Miserere nobis. Lord
Of the cellar, (hide!) Lord
Of the attic, let it be mercy
Falling semi-automatic.
Dona
Dona nobis pacem.
Lead us beside quiet
Waters, no more to bury
Our sons and our daughters.
Peace. Grant us ceasefire.
Grant us peace.
Feature Image: A memorial set up outside Robb Elementary school for the victims of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, US.
The prize painting in the National Gallery of Ireland is, without a doubt, Caravaggio’s depiction of The Taking of Christ. The painter presents us with an iconic image of Judas in the act of betraying Christ with the sign of a kiss, as previously arranged with Roman legionaries, who are depicted in costumes from Caravaggio’s own time.
In fact, Caravaggio even depicts himself in this great work, bearing a lantern so that he might better see the image of Christ.
I am always reminded of the Rolling Stones song on Exile of Main Street in which Jagger sings ‘don’t talk to me about Jesus, I just want to see his face!’ And of course, Oscar Wilde’s unforgettable lines taken from The Ballad of Reading Goal:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
So, betrayal in art, and particularly embodied in the Biblical figure of Judas, is nothing new. In fact, when I first saw some of Michael Corrigan’s Judas poems, which was around this time two years ago, while co- editing the April edition of Live Encounters Poetry and Writing with Mark Ulyseas, I was immediately reminded of Brendan Kennelly’s Book of Judas (Bloodaxe Books, 1991) .
So, I was intrigued. It was high time – twenty year separates the publication of these books – that a poet from this most treacherous of isles penned a few poems treating of the monumental and time-honoured theme of betrayal.
Indeed, James Joyce never stopped harping on about how Irish history was full of tales of treachery. A Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist (1916) begins with the parents of the young artist in question arguing over the betrayal of Charles Stewart Parnell.
Continuing on the political scene – as a Cork man – how could I miss an opportunity to bring up the assassination of Michael Collins…!
But enough, if I keep enumerating all the treacherous, low down dirty deeds that have been committed down through Irish history and immortalised by writers, and artists I’ll never get started on this review!
But one final word: isn’t it interesting that both Michael Corrigan’s book and Brendan Kennelly’s were published in the UK?
Achtung, “The best way to serve the age is to betray it”…. The Book of Judas. Brendan Kennelly. 17/4/36-17/10/21. RIP. – Bono pic.twitter.com/S7rWFC6kHG
The title poem of the book greets the reader on the first page, here is the final verse.
On the night I sold you to the wolves of respectability,
in Gethsemane where sleeping olives dreamed of rain,
I pressed my face to the loamy earth and beneath a moon too cold
to touch, I believe I heard her mournful sigh;
“nothing is new, nothing is new,
I have seen it all before.”
The poet, imagining himself as Judas makes the figure contemporaneous, which he also does quite successfully with other Biblical figures in the collection, such as Maryfrom Magdala. This last poem offers a really poignant insight into the Bible’s most notorious harlot who washes the feet of Jesus with her hair; indeed it is said by some to be that she was the sexual partner of the man from Nazareth – he the son God, the lover of a prostitute! Say what you like, but by God that book (the Bible) is a cracker. No wonder it’s a bestseller!
In Ephesus her end of days,
nights shallow with shortening breath,
a mill beneath the small bare room,
millstones grinding, dark sea lapping at her door.
I also love how in the first verse the poet informs the reader of Mary’s wealthy origins. As an Irishman, Corrigan understands people’s innate prejudices; as we are far more likely to forgive someone coming from a ‘good’ home, in other words a wealthy family, than a person from a poor background.
This goes back to Max Weber, who recognised a correlation between wealth and respectability, perversely conflated in the West with spirituality. This idea of respectability, signalled very early on in the very first poem – see again above – underscores the whole collection The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot; especially how such a notion, being respectable, makes traitors or ‘Judases’ of us all. It is into this constantly recurring idea that the poet mines, to wonderful effect.
She sang sea music, fluent in the rise and fall,
knew deep, dark places that calved the biggest waves.
From the flat roof of a prosperous house in Magdala, Galillee,
watched the purple gather of every winter storm
chase small boats to harbour before an angry swell.
I don’t know how historically accurate any of the above is, nor do I particularly care. Poets were never well known, or appreciated, for their attention to facts, at least in days of yore; metaphor being their quarry to a far greater extent.
It is only recently, I believe, that poets actually have had to literally embody their work in both life and deed, literally breathing words of blessed scripture. Good lord, good luck to them!
Vineyards in the Champagne region of France.
Terroir
Another particular feature of what, I believe, is Mister Corrigan’s second superlative collection is the irreverent and humorous nature of some of the poems.
At times, I was reminded of another stalwart in the recent Irish literary canon, and that is Paul Durcan. Michael Corrigan, being but a few years older than myself, is of that generation that grew up during the Depression in 1980s Ireland, and his humour is deeply informed by the experience of busts and booms, in that particular order.
This is something that you simply cannot imitate. The French have the term terroir which is particular to their culture. They use it principally to describe the distinctive flavour and taste of a certain cheese or wine that can be traced to the particularities of weather and soil of the place it comes from in France.
Champagne is an obvious example of this cultural phenomenon. No other sparkling white wine can use the term unless it comes from this specific region. The French feel other sparkling drinks, such as Prosecco, come from very different terroirs with different soil and climates and so cannot possibly be described using the term.
The particular terroir that Michael Corrigan comes from is a feature informing the aesthetic of his work; like the shells in the soil that inform that old white wine that comes from Bordeaux and whose name escapes me now…
When the dark waters of sleep
close across my resting butch face
and I become a fat Ophelia
floating down the weedy slope
of memory, hope and duck billed platitudes,
back to childhood, back to faith,
where a diarrhoea fountain
of bare-knuckled nationalism
provides us with its dullard troops
each one trained to shit on sight,
the brightest and best promoted to teach
in the places that smelled of failure and feet.
There are many so-called poets who are praised for their satirical nature. Many is the time that I have read their work and wondered what all the fuss was about.
Poetic trends, like any, come and go . But verse such as the above would certainly qualify as satire of the very highest order. God knows every particular cuntry has its own exasperating strains, and dear old Ireland is no exception.
Embracing Mediocrity
I remember being at an exhibition in one of the older more established art galleries in Dublin and a very famous photographer, who had made his career abroad, commented on how in the Republic we make a point of embracing mediocrity
It is this particular phenomenon, again, that I think Mr Corrigan is particularly good at eking out. Begrudgery being another!
when masters came to class tooled up
and the biggest looters wore the best suits,
Every society has its particular issues. I’ve lived long enough in France to spot some there, and having lived with an Italian for over twenty years, I am qualified to identify that country’s or rather its peoples, foibles.
What Corrigan is particularly good at putting his finger on here (both of the above quotes are taken from Unlearning my Place) is the atrocious competitiveness produced by living on a small island, where everybody is fighting for their portion of the land.
You also find it in the novels of Andrea Camilleri describing Sicily. The cold, brutal violence of the mafia in his case. In the Republic of Ireland, things are a lot less dramatic. Dead is the word. Everybody is caught in a kind of entropy that James Joyce identified on page one of Dubliners – PARALYSIS.
The disease has not gone away. Irish society, in general, is still plagued by it. The absolute awfulness of social convention. The tiresome scene that informs everything. Even poetry!
Choose friends wisely,
enemies will self-select,
smiling like tigers or growling like bears,
an arm around your shoulder
while pissing down your leg,
the welcome will be warm
before you’re taken out and shot.
The indirect nature which seems to govern everybody’s speech, the coded chatter, the back stabbing nature that it all creates. All the atrocious hallmarks of the ‘Irish’ when at home; behind the smiling eyes: the daggers in their bones.
The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot – Poems by Mick Corrigan is a wonderful collection of both poetry and verse. The first is infused with Biblical insight and learning, while the latter is concocted with sharp and bitter knowledge won, no doubt, first-hand by the author who thinks so little of the slights by now that he has made it the stuff of polished rhymes and memorable phrases.
The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot: Poems by Mick Corrigan Dionysia Press Ltd, 2021
59 pages – £15.50
Poems in the Manner of the Devil After Alexandar Ristović (1933-1994)
If you can’t chew on oxtail, eat knuckles instead.
The bounty of bedlam,
Let these crumbs be your Thanksgiving,
Or Last Suppers.
Imitation is always the greatest form of flattery.
See the world now through the light of wine.
Do you have confidence in the morning?
Do you have faith in toast?
Each morning, do you spread marmalade
Under the clouds in the sky?
Here, drink this little cup of coffee.
Taste the bitterness brewed in countless suns
And raise your little finger, subconsciously,
To honour the martyrdom of little buns.
These trees that surround you,
Why do there branches rise like accusatory fingers
Holding peaches up to the clouds?
Where have all the flamingos flown?
Into the jaws of baboons in hell.
Columns, arches… shit!
Commerce herself is dizzied by the sun.
But know also this,
That within all of this madness
There is one alone who sleeps quietly
Nestled in dreams like a bird
And she dreams of housing owls
While presiding over countless committees.
Break Fast
The table- cloth was a souvenir from Turkey.
It had a very simple olive pattern,
The kind you might find in a good café
Or restaurant where the meals were affordable.
The kind you might find your hands floating over
Stirring spoons of sugar or lifting glasses
And bottles of water and wine, picking up bread
And paper napkins or surely raising to take out
Bank cards, in order to settle the bill.
In order to settle the bill.
Hardly is this last phrase out and everything,
The whole panoply of artifacts,
Suddenly is in freefall before you,
Like that last joke you heard before leaving.
The Familiar
Don’t talk to me about storms in teacups,
Speak rather about the dervish in your espresso.
For your idioms and metaphor are tired,
As tired as my crocs worn out from pacing
Over the same old living space. Here, then,
Is where I dwell in both the word and the poem.
And, in memory! The ontological shifts
Which we must surely feel as much as the pedal
Pressing down on the pianoforte, sustaining the SOUND
The words vibrating, each particular element,
Each particular word, key, shape or movement
Given the proper attention it deserves.
Such is modality. Yes, I would speak to you of modality,
And the ontological shifts in taking a coffee!
Janus
I will Putinize you, you know what I mean!
As I think it say it my reptilian eyes roll over
Blocking out momentarily the carrion tinted sun.
For, each encounter is a potential existential threat.
So, I repeat it again as I move closer to you
Physically and you will have the opportunity
Of understanding what it is I am now telling you again.
If you do Not do as I ask, I will Putinize you!
Putinize – a verb designated to describe
The systematic annihilation of either a person,
A place, an animal or a thing so that the object
Is no longer physically recognisable anymore.
Just as the city will be left in rubble, the person
Will no longer be recognisable instead left lifeless; like himself.
Kyiv
After the heroic age there are only two options remaining,
for hatred can only burn for so long before eventually capitulating
to either madness or so- called reason.
How dare you go, leaving me
alone to do the mowing?
You used to dig the plantains
out by hand and rake the moss
but after you went I called in
a firm to weed and feed the lawn.
It is green and even now,
clear of buttercups and daisies.
I start at the outside mowing in
until there is only a thin rectangle left.
Then that too is smooth, flat
as the oblong of your grave.
When I am gone
I want to finish in a sacred space,
not in a municipal cemetery;
an acre that is more than just a place
overwatered by tears of misery.
One that shows the world a happier face
enriched with centuries of history.
Crematoria grow only funeral wreaths,
mowed lawns with granulated bones beneath.
I want smart women in stiletto heels
to totter on my plot to see the bride
and chuck confetti while children kneel
to make their fragile daisy chains beside
my headstone, where teenagers conceal
illicit cans of lager drunk outside.
So that my body there is just another layer
in the geology of hope and prayer.
How ghastly the day before yesterday was
now everyone associated with it is dead.
In the future I’ll be against
what’s going on now.
I’ll be on the television,
horrified. But not yet.
As a civilised person,
I’m absolutely in favour of the nice policeman now,
one hundred percent against the tear gas and dogs
you forced him to use on you back then.
Sometime the century after next.
I’ll be against giving the children of Bethlehem
something from Lockheed Martin
to occupy themselves with for Christmas.
Like I was against rhino-whipping the blacks
into line in Port Elizabeth, Ladysmith, Pietermaritzburg
after it stopped happening.
But, for now, see no alternative.
Feature image: police dog during a demonstration in England.
My lungs were out of helium, so I wandered out of my anti-memory cell to buy some freedom vouchers. The land, its never-satisfied lips… I remembered every man was his dog (and a mad Englishman.) I remembered being a bumblebee in milk. Agony and honeysuckle. Was I vaccinated against imprisonment? Was I immune to the moon?
A man was carrying his presence towards me. His haemoglobin eyes… We prayed unto unentanglement. We sang, “Don’t wasteland me! Teach me how to live inside the waiting.”
The guardians of sociability descended on us from a Times New Roman cloud. We pleaded guilty to togetherness. They later indemnified us for the loss of our identities.
This smell of undocumented thoughts, the South of my drowning voice… Sing the restricted body, whisper to an unrestricted mind. We always have a choice between not dying and not living.
Disaster
As I was leaving the museum of names, I noticed that I had lost my number tag. Now I can’t sip taxes or sculpt coins. I have to play a cross-check game with the Department of Streamlined Health that likes eschatology, September snowflakes, and the Nebraska samurai. Not necessarily in this order.
There’s no return to what has abandoned you. I’ve learned from a birch how to jive. My cat has taught me some Descartes. Can I solve the mystery of “me” in the garden of sculptures? If I get there, how am I supposed to pose?
Opinion drones are out to get me. I have to hide now; I may join a non-prophet organisation and appear, disguised, in their grotto photos. I’ll need to know my nameless, numberless self the way a camel knows the geometry of the desert.
Body and Mind
A railway station, splinter-European. The sky in black and white. The lounge lit with blue Plexiglas eyes. A preacher of health peeps in through every window. “We can all be safe,” his parrot parlours. On the neighbouring bench, somebody has his hose amputated. His showerhead bleeds incongruous truths.
A woman takes a back seat inside my eyes. “My name is Deci-belle,” she addresses the pigeons behind my back. “Sorry about the dehosement; you weren’t supposed to be in such proximity. I am just a denouncer; this was nothing of my doting.”
The clock blinks 66.31. The absence of train arrives – its own stationmaster, a hyperbola shading in its innards. A tannoy splashes the brain symphony. The preacher swallows his badge saying “Your body, our choice,” and begins lizarding between ministerial decrees towards radio clarity.
