Capturing mood of the nation during lockdown

Lifestyle – A stint as Ireland’s ‘Pandemic Poet Laureate’ on RTÉ radio inspired the latest collection from poet Rita Ann Higgins, which offers a unique insight into the early days of Covid-19 in Ireland.  A woman with a keen sense of social justice and great deal of wit, she also addresses several dark episodes from our recent history.  Rita Ann talks to JUDY MURPHY about her life and work.

Poet and writer Rita Ann Higgins wasn’t expecting to launch a new collection of work during 2020 – it’s only been a year since her previous book, Our Killer City, a mix of poetry and prose, and normally there’d be a gap of a few years between publications, she says.

But she wasn’t expecting a global pandemic either. And it’s why she’s produced this new collection, Pathogens Love a Patsy, which has just been published by Salmon Press.

At the very beginning of lockdown in mid-March, The Brendan O’Connor Show on RTÉ Radio One contacted Rita Ann to know if she’d written anything about Covid-19. At the time, she hadn’t because like most of us, she hadn’t really engaged with it. But she wrote a poem and sent it in. They didn’t use it. The following week she sent them another, which they asked her to read out. That marked the beginning of a weekly series that lasted until the end of June.

The cover of the resulting collection, Pathogens Love a Patsy, has a blurb from the English writer and critic Robert McCrum in which he describes the book as ‘a souvenir of the time when we laughed and cried for life and death’. It’s apt, because in poems such as Cocoonery, Knee Deep in NPHET, I Must Wash Down the Bannister and the title poem, Pathogens Love a Patsy, Rita Ann captured life in those early days of living with Covid-19. With rapier-sharp wit and precision, she chronicled the fear, worry and sense of being overwhelmed by this enormous and unknown event as people tried to retain some semblance of daily routine and an element of control, especially in the intense early days.

“I kept going up to the end of June when we thought it was the end,” she says.  “We know now it wasn’t the end, but the end of a stage.”

Pathogens Love a Patsy is divided into three sections, with the first part, Pandemic Poems having brought her a whole new audience, as all bar one of the 13 included featured on the Brendan O’Connor Show.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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