Tongulish

New
Paperback
2016
$11.83

Tongulish is the language of sweet talk and honeyed words, babble and blather, quibble and quizzical. And tongulish is spoken throughout Rita Ann Higgins's lively new collection. These are provocative and heart-warming poems of high jinx and telling social comment by a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of Irish lives and foibles, mischievous and playful in their portrayal of feckless folk and outcasts, flirts and weasels, gasbags and scallywags.

Synopsis

Tongulish is the language of sweet talk and honeyed words, babble and blather, quibble and quizzical. And tongulish is spoken throughout Rita Ann Higgins's lively new collection. These are provocative and heart-warming poems of high jinx and telling social comment by a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of Irish lives and foibles, mischievous and playful in their portrayal of feckless folk and outcasts, flirts and weasels, gasbags and scallywags.

$11.83

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Published: 21 Apr 2016
ISBN 10: 1780373031
ISBN 13: 9781780373034

Media Reviews

'It shouldn't be unusual to hear a smart, sassy, unabashed, female working-class voice in Irish writing. But it is. Higgins's achievement doesn't depend on that rarity value, but it is certainly amplified by it. Higgins is, quite consciously, an artistic outsider... a unique fusion of wry, deadpan humour on the one side and absolute sincerity on the other. She doesn't congratulate herself for her sympathy with those who are (in this case literally) outside the world of art. She simply sees and writes. Her humour and playfulness keep sentimentality and self-righteousness resolutely at bay... She has made what is still the most direct and powerful statement of the class divide in Irish society... The boom years had no great effect on Higgins's voice, on her point of view or on her style. She had a manic linguistic energy long before the hysteria of the Tiger era quickened the pulse of the culture as a whole: Higgins could be regarded, in one of her guises, as Ireland's first rapper... Her political satire hasn't lost its edge, but it no longer reads as a cry in the wilderness... Now the bubble's burst, we're left with our real treasures, and Rita Ann Higgins is one of them.' - Fintan O'Toole, writing in The Irish Times on Ireland Is Changing Mother

Author Bio

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 (Poetry Book Society Recommendation) (1996), An Awful Racket (2001), Throw in the Vowels: New & Selected Poems (2005) and Ireland Is Changing Mother (2011) from Bloodaxe, and Hurting God: Prose & Poems (2010) from Salmon. Throw in the Vowels was reissued in 2010 with an audio CD of her reading her poems, and a new collection, Tongulish, is due from Bloodaxe in 2016. 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) and The Empty Frame (2008). Her many awards include a Peadar O'Donnell Award in 1989 and several Arts Council bursaries, and she is a member of Aosdana.