Facing up to the new Ireland

POETRY: IRELAND IS IN A BAD WAY, and Rita Ann Higgins, often dubbed a laureate of the dispossessed, is not shying away from writing about it. A few weeks ago Fintan O'Toole rightly lauded in this paper her "smart, sassy, unabashed, female working-class voice", calling her one of Ireland's real treasures.

In her new collection , Ireland Is Changing Mother(Bloodaxe, £8.95), Higgins adroitly embraces the anger and frustration that characterise our "cutback climate". And she does so with a sensitivity, honesty and humour that give this wry collection a gravitas that transcends the often frivolous language of the individual poems.

The volume opens with the title poem that addresses “mother”, urging her to recognise the changing social and ethnic landscape around her:

They don't just integrate, they limp-pa-grate,

your sons are shrinking mother.

Before this mother,

your sons were Gods of that powerful thing.

Gods of the apron string.

With characteristic dry humour and gritty language the poet wittily exposes the anachronism of Mother Ireland and her “menacing” sons, the “local yokels”. The poem is funny and irreverent, but on a deeper level it also satirises some of the root causes of xenophobia and social exclusion in contemporary Ireland.

Higgins has always been an advocate of the voiceless, and in all her published volumes she comes across as a fearless contemporaneous archivist of the dispossessed. Ireland Is Changing Motheris no exception, and we can find references to ghost estates, the newly unemployed, homeless beggars and the Rossport Five.

However, continuing in the vein of her semiprosaic memoir/poetry, Hurting God(some of the poems are in fact reprints from that collection), this volume also offers poetic glimpses into a repressed and somewhat fearful childhood that was overshadowed by Catholic guilt and an unpredictable father figure. The subtler of these works contemplate the intersection of superstition and religion, such as the witty Whitethorn, which beautifully re-creates a child's sense of foreboding when listening to her mother's warning:

Unseen with the naked eye

the force could take one half of the twins

down to the fairy fort or further

into the fog in Coyne’s field, never to be seen again.

‘The lord protect us from all harm,

Don’t ever bring that whitethorn into the house.’

(Do ye renounce Satan? We do)

With evocative rhythm and a chant-like quality, Whitethornreimagines a childhood spent in awe of the supernatural, not quite understanding any of it but experiencing it as an eerie kind of protection, a "christening blanket with thorns".

Higgins is a poet of situations: her keen eye for the absurd, the humorous, the eerie or the angry gives her work an honesty that is rare among writers. Ireland Is Changing Mothernot only calls attention to the marginalised victims of an increasingly alienating (and alienated) society but also chronicles, with an untameable and provocative voice, the poet's own journey towards understanding her personal and social history.

ORIGINALLY FROM the Netherlands, Judith Mok is a multilingual poet and classical singer who travels the world. Her debut collection in English, Gods of Babel(Salmon Poetry, €12), is an assortment of prose poems and shorter lyrics that span several countries, languages and poetic personae. Mok is one of Ireland's immigrant poets; as such, her work provides a glimpse into the cultural world of this community, heterogeneous as it is.

Many of the poems in the volume contemplate questions of belonging and identity, such as the lyrical

Amsterdam Sunday,

which, mourning a lost childhood landscape, concludes that “My Sunday is a Dublin one”.

Music is an overarching theme, and there are several attempts at capturing the magic of singing, with the best of them conveying some sense of wonder and amazement:

Or we could walk on

Through the Soukh in Istanbul

And pick up small, shining items

Like the particles of sound that

Emerge from my throat when I sing

Breakable butterflies

That you would like to catch

Gods of Babelcontains some beautiful imagery and promising ideas. Like the eponymous tower, however, this volume aims very high but does not quite reach its target.

Borbála Faragó is the editor, with Eva Bourke, of Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland