The new issue of Studi irlandesi.A Journal of Irish Studies contains an extended essay titled 'The Language of Globalization in Contemporary Irish Poetry' by Benjamin Keatinge.
Magazine editor Monica Randaccio says this of Keatinge's essay in here introduction to the issue:
"Benjamin Keatinge’s essay considers how contemporary
Irish poets have
responded to the changing socio-economic realities of
Irish life since 1990. He
states that several Irish poets have written persuasively
about the dangers of consumerism
and, in order to do so, they use the language of
marketplace and the
vocabulary of contemporaneity, which they usually
satirise. According to Keatinge,
political and social satire has enjoyed something of a
revival in Irish poetry recently
and one of the characteristics of good satire is to use
the vocabulary of received
ideas in order to mock those same ideas. At the same
time, globalisation and the
modern economy have led to profound transformations in
lifestyles and these
poets have had to find a language to describe new modes
of existence, reflecting
the globalised social reality in the twenty-first
century. Through an examination
of themes such as work, consumerism, the encroachment of
cyber-space and
changing urban lifestyles, Keatinge demonstrates how
Irish poets have risen to the
challenge of finding a language to capture what Zygmunt
Bauman terms “liquid
modernity”. Therefore, the late Dennis O’Driscoll, Rita Ann
Higgins, Peter Sirr,
as well as Billy Ramsell, Kevin Higgins and Iggy
McGovern, provide excellent
examples of how poets can turn the language of
globalisation into a critique of
globalisation’s economic hegemony."
."
And here's what Benjamin Keatinge has to say about me, or rather, about my poetry:
“Another Galway-based poet with a distrust of the “Big
Boys” is Kevin Higgins, author of four volumes which mingle reflections on his
own brand of left-wing politics with several state of the nation poems
alongside satires of political mismanagement and corruption. Born in England,
Higgins’ family returned to Ireland in 1974 when he was seven to live in Galway
and Higgins experienced the worst of 1980s
recessionary Ireland as well as the upheavals of Thatcher’s England. His take on the Celtic Tiger and its
aftermath is predictably acerbic. The
sanitized, politically-correct Ireland of recent times is described in the 2010 volume Frightening New Furniture as “this
minimalist spaceship / where people just sip
their decaffeinated water / and listen to David Gray” (2010,21). The poem “That
Was My Country” from the same volume, displays an ironic nostalgia for a less (or possibly more) wholesome
Ireland: “When there was planning permission
/ for anything and morning / was breakfast baps and gravel / going back that road by the truckload” (2010,
24). Higgins’ poetry presents the poet’s
persona as a self-deprecating, aging radical whose memories of political counter-culture from the early 1980s cannot
help but cast in a negative light the new,
insipid but superficially improved Ireland of more recent years.”
