KEVIN HIGGINS, who died on January 10 2023 in Galway, Ireland, aged 55, was the only poet to be expelled twice from the British Labour Party for his poetry. Once in 2016 for a satirical piece about Tony Blair; again in 2021 for publishing a poem in a “proscribed” newspaper (which was not the Sun or the Daily Mail).
 
Kevin was as engaged a poet as you could ever meet. He wrote on the Anti-Water Charges movement, Black Lives Matter and the radical end of Extinction Rebellion. He mobilised other poets to bring out “21 Poems for Jeremy Corbyn.”

He appeared many times in the Morning Star and read regularly on the Sunday online Not the Andrew Marr Show. He was fiercely critical of poets who did not engage: “What first strikes me when I read contemporary poetry is not that it is either particularly good or particularly bad but that it mostly doesn’t matter.”

He said that seeing his poem on the movement to legalise abortion in Ireland posted up anonymously on a ruined building meant more to him than any literary journal appearance.
 
He came to Galway aged 27 after political activism in London with Militant, exhausted and dispirited by the legacy of Thatcherism and the triumphalism of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland.