Tongulish (Paperback)

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.

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 twelve 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, and Hurting God: Prose & Poems (2010) and Our Killer City: isms, chisms, chasms and chisms: essays and poems (2018) from Salmon. Throw in the Vowels was reissued in 2010 with an audio CD of her reading her poems. 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 and several Arts Council bursaries, and she is a member of Aosdána.