NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Kevin Higgins is a widely published poet, who has performed his work across the world. His is a committed, engaged poetry, shot through with both humour and melancholy. In a conversational tone, he describes the slightly grubby details of what passes for real life for many people between work and settling down to watch the television. He is all too aware of the precariousness of society and the communities we live in, and not afraid to tackle politics. The political poems are always thought provoking, though I found many of them lacking in lyricism. However, it is perhaps too easy for poets to avoid observations such as those in THE LEADER:

		But he'll be here,
	like the old man buying The Racing Post
	who growls about 'invaders' or the skinhead 
	with the petrol bomb whose hour is striking now.

On the other hand, some of the more personal poems in the collection offer some real moments of beauty. WINTER IN MINNESOTA for example, is a lovely sad meditation on mortality and the slightness of life:

	Never imagined he'd have to winter back in Minnesota,
	be there standing on his mother's front lawn,
	like a distant cousin in a photograph no-one remembers taking.

	Just another suburban marriage,
	it detonated and toppled in upon itself
	raising a frenetic smog of terminal
	dust over the migraine sky.

	May the music we make 
	be a Spanish guitar,
	let no disconsolate adagio
	be any creation of ours.