Jiving with Wasps

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.'

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.