A social class in a poem - with humour

Choosing poems for people on my Write One Poem workshop to read, I particularly liked This was no Ithaca from Rita Ann Higgins' book Hurting God - Part Essay Part Rhyme (scroll down the link page on Salmon Poetry to read the poem). In a poem laced with humour, compassion and anger, she encapsulates a social world, a point in history, issues of class, depression and gender. All this in a poem so easy to read you could almost say it reads itself.