Salmon Poetry celebrates ‘The Boy With No Face’

galway | arts and media | event notice Tuesday August 21, 2007 16:39 by Over The Edge

Kevin Higgins’s debut poetry collection ‘The Boy With No Face’ was Salmon Poetry’s bestselling book of 2005 and has recently been reprinted. To celebrate the rare enough event of a debut poetry collection going to a second printing an invited group of readers will read their favourite poems from ‘The Boy With No Face’ in Galway City Library on Wednesday, September 5th at 6.30pm. The MC for the evening will be John Walsh, organiser of North Beach Poetry Nights.

Kevin Higgins’s debut poetry collection ‘The Boy With No Face’ was Salmon Poetry’s bestselling book of 2005 and has recently been reprinted. To celebrate the rare enough event of a debut poetry collection going to a second printing an invited group of readers will read their favourite poems from ‘The Boy With No Face’ in Galway City Library on Wednesday, September 5th at 6.30pm. The MC for the evening will be John Walsh, organiser of North Beach Poetry Nights.

The readers will be Jessie Lendennie, Councillor Niall O’Brolcháin, Trish Casey, Susan Millar DuMars, Kernan Andrews, Gary King, James C. Harrold, Celeste Augé, Susan Lindsay & Niall McCarthy.

Everyone is welcome.
‘The Boy With No Face’ was shortlisted for the 2006 Strong Award for Best First Collection by an Irish Poet. http://www.salmonpoetry.com/theboy.html Kevin’s second collection, ‘Time Gentlemen, Please’ will be published next year by Salmon Poetry. Kevin’s work will also feature in the anthology Salmon: A Journey in Poetry, an anthology of Salmon Poets with a narrative by Salmon editor Jessie Lendennie, to celebrate Salmon's 25th Anniversary of literary publishing (Autumn 2007)

What the critics said about The Boy With No Face:

“What makes Higgins’ work so fresh is that the objects of his wrath are both contemporary and powerful. He does not kick people when they are down, like the fake satirist, or flog dead horses for a comfortable audience. His targets are doing damage now and he's out to get them.” Rory Brennan, Books Ireland

“Kevin Higgins is brimful of ideas and makes real efforts to entertain his readers at all times.” Magma

“There’s a hard-boiled grittiness here - he is a kind of anti-celebrant. His bathos can be refreshing, and the anger lurking just beneath the surface (in poems such as 'A Brief History of Those Who Made Their Point Politely And Then Went Home') invigorating.” Henry Shukman, Poetry London

“Upon entering Kevin Higgins’ debut collection of poems, The Boy With No Face, one immediately hears echoes of Andre Breton’s famous words, ‘Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future.’ Higgins’ work, like Breton's, depends upon such black humour” Kimberly Burwick, Vallum Contemporary Poetry (Montreal, Canada)

“Higgins has forsaken a direct interest in form, or the lyric, to stake out territory that is far more bleak, blunt and necessary - he speaks as an angry man at the turn of a new century, one who refuses to be bought or sold, but knows the value of words that aren’t simply being used for display, disguise - he is a sort of master of expressing disgust, and praising the shabby.” Todd Swift

“Gifted poetic talents like Kevin Higgins rescue language from the “blatant blather of knaves” in which it is immured, and harness its vitality so as to tell it like it really is.” Tomás Mac Síomóin

“While there is a definite leftward viewpoint articulated in the political poems, there are no easy answers. “No Such Republic” declares, “Socialism, like the buses, is running late”, while in “The Bankrupt Years” the speaker appears resigned and declares that he will “trudge,/through this desolate cackle, on out of my age”…All of this must put Higgins at odds with some of the socialist poets he has formerly been associated with, and yet The Boy with No Face outpaces them poetically by a not inconsiderable distance.” Michael S. Begnal, The Black Mountain Review

“His work manages the rare feat of being both unashamedly political and cliché free. His poems are often humorous, but they always have a deadly intent.” Dave Lordan

“Out of the west rides Kevin Higgins, brandishing his first collection”, James J. McAuley, The Irish Times

“The poems are deceptive. They read easily, without apparent obscurity, so it is no surprise that the author is an accomplished and popular performer of his own work, but there is always that extra seam to be mined on re-reading. This is one of the most satisfying first collections I have read in several years.” Adrian Green, Littoral magazine (UK)

“ ‘Blackhole’ seeds anaphoric subordinate clauses within anaphoric sentences: ‘This is the place where council estates come complete / with built in big dogs and gunshots, where a dull sun bakes the furnace air / as tower-block windows give that careless look / that only tranquilised eyes can throw’. The poem has a venom to its urban vision that conjures a bitter, articulate speaker.” Chris Jennings, Books In Canada

“If Higgins's poetry is Larkinesque, it is equally possessed of a Whitmanesque breadth of vision and a Dickinsonian depth, culminating in a voice - funny, incisive, and genuinely modest - entirely his own.” Donna Potts, West 47 online

“A devilishly funny and frank way of looking at Galway and the wider world mark the poetry of Kevin Higgins’ first collection ‘The Boy With No Face’” Kernan Andrews, The Galway Advertiser

Salmon Poetry, Knockeven, Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland

Tel: +353 (0)65 7081941 / Fax: +353 (0)65 7081941
For general queries, please email: [email protected]