CELEBRATIONThe latest book from Paul Durcan comes as the writer is awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College. Here, writers celebrate the life and spirit of the people's poet
PAUL DURCAN, ONE of Ireland's best-known poets, has published his own selection of his poetry from the past 40 years, Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967 – 2007(Harvill Secker, €18.99). Trinity College, Dublin, is hosting a symposium on his work next Thursday to Saturday. He will be awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College next Friday. Below, a number of writers reflect on Durcan's readings and work.
PAULA MEEHAN
I think of him as an Irish aboriginal, the mind diamond sharp and of the now, in the flickering dreamlight of a forest clearing. I apprehend an imagination shaped by the land itself, its rivers, lakes, mountains, cliffs, beaches, its fractured suburbs and desperate city streets, its weathers and humours; an understanding deeply informed by our communal history on the island; and a heart made compassionate by his own personal history as son and lover, as friend and father.
His natural and chosen enemy is the institutionalised mind – whether on that macro level where death dealers construct their death plans, or on the micro level of the petty tyrannies of bureaucrats who spin us into their absurdist megalomanic delusions.
He delineates with cold precision a particularly Irish version of what William Blake called “mind-forged manacles” and by describing them helps us break free of hypocrisy. Or at least helps us recognise the cant that often passes for political discourse, a crucial step in the development of a conscience.
With the publication of Life is a Dream, we begin to see the heft and verve of his life's achievement. There is a powerful central vision which does not flinch even as it considers the darkest realms of the human soul. The strategies of poetic composition are various, ambitious, crafty – experimental or time-worn as the poem's occasion demands. His songs will reduce you to tears of helpless laughter as often as they'll move you to tears of sorrow.
I love teaching Paul Durcan: in my experience the most poetry-resistant melt before him, those who’ve been wounded by bad experiences of verse in school, those who’ve been made to feel ignorant and excluded, are restored to poetry’s true and democratic home.
And the cracked, the broken, the maimed, the non-copers and losers, even a certain kind of holy fool, he suffers gladly. This is a poetry for the befuddled, the disorganised, the demented, the muddling through, the most of us. His songs celebrate our small mercies and tender decencies in a world that favours the glic, the corrupt, the greedy, the alpha-gobshites.
Yes, I see him shaking his feathers, rattling his bones in the dreamlight of the forest, lost in a stately trance, an urban (and urbane) shaman, who reminds us how to be human and how to be brave.
Paula Meehan is a poet and playwright whose latest book of poetry, Painting Rain, is published by Carcanet.
DIARMAID FERRITER
I was participating in the Tallaght Reader's Day recently where Paul read from his collected poems. I had spoken before him, and he began his reading by announcing that since my last two books have been on de Valera and sex, he thought it fitting to read from his 1978 poem Making Love Outside Áras an Uachtaráin. It contains these concluding lines concerning an imagined confrontation between young lovers and old President de Valera.
I see him now in the heat-haze of the day
Blindly stalking us down;
And, levelling an ancient rifle, he says “Stop
Making love outside Áras an Uachtaráin”
I was delighted and honoured, as it’s one of my favourite poems. As with so many of his poems it conjures up memorable images, is full of biting satire and devilment, highlights the clash of generations and customs and the tension between a traditional and modern Ireland. I try to include poetry in the writing of history, and I think it’s particularly appropriate to use Durcan, as I see him as a poet who humanises history. His collected poems are a valuable record of social history, as well as containing challenges to some of the sacred tenets of Irish nationalism.
The first time I came across his work was in 1987 when he published the collection Going Home to Russia. The verses of the title poem made communist Russia seem preferable to the rut Ireland was in, and therein lies the value of Durcan: not only did that poem speak to me as a teenager witnessing the country in crisis; it is also a poem that can be used more than 20 years later by the historian to bring alive the history of the period and capture its angst and anger.
Reading the verses in print is one thing; seeing and hearing Durcan perform in front of an audience is quite another. His dismissive parodies are a tonic and the way in which his poems engage with public life and scandal as well as ordinary people, parents and families means his connection with his audience is uniquely strong. He is mesmerising, melancholic, lyrical, defiant and cheeky, often all at the same time. Above all, like Patrick Kavanagh, he has always been brutally honest, even during times when truthfulness was resisted and resented.
Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at University College, Dublin. His latest book, Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland, is published by Profile Books.
ANNE ENRIGHT
Like Paul Durcan, I was born in the Stella Maris nursing home on Earlsfort Terrace. It was a different year, and a different day in October, but I like to think we came into the same autumn weather, saw first daylight to the sound of the same church bells, in some faint and precise triangulation: Rathmines, University Church, Whitefriar Street.
So whenever his name comes up I like to say (a little darkly indeed), “We were born in the same room.” I enjoy saying this because it sounds like one of his lines; not that the cadence is right, but it has the absurd sense of meaning everything and nothing. There is a promise there, or a threat, and the knowledge that all threats and all promises are empty. It does and undoes itself at the same time.
It is this strenuous work of doing and undoing that makes Paul Durcan close his eyes when he recites his work; the book in his hand only there to remind us that a book is also possible; it is the sense that the poem is fighting for its existence, that it could just as easily stop – but by some twisted miracle, some jouissance, it will not stop until it is done.
I met him first in 1995 on a six-city tour: me, Paul, Colm Tóibín; the wig, the snail, and the cross, as we styled ourselves, after the books we each had out at the time. London, Swansea, Portsmouth – after that it begins to blur – Paul Durcan in a yellow jumper, closing his eyes on one stage after another and blowing the audience away. I was only a child in book years, which, like dog years, are longer than the human.
I did not know you could do that to an audience. And though I don’t think I ever shut up at that time of my life – neither, when I think of it, did Colm Tóibín – we shut up, right enough, when Durcan took the stage.
I like your irises.
This said by a bus conductor on, yes, Earlsfort Terrace to the poet, who is bringing the flowers to his widowed mother. And the line is delivered with such fine camp, it sounds like a knife in the ribs, or a lick on your ear.
Lovely irises you have – let me touch them, as they pass the room where some drunken obstetrician pulled Paul Durcan out into the world, thank God.
I bought a bunch, just thinking of him – such lovely irises. I put them on my desk to write this.
Anne Enright's novel, The Gathering, won the Booker Prize in 2007.
COLM TÓIBÍN
I first heard about Paul Durcan from the poet James Liddy in the early 1970s. Two or three years later the historian James McGuire mentioned to me that Paul Durcan had been among the students when he had lectured in history at University College Cork. I knew that Paul Durcan had gone on to study archaeology. The following year Ernie Hughes, who was director of studies at the Dublin School of English in Barcelona, told me that he had a box of books under his bed which the poet Paul Durcan had left behind in the city.
I heard Paul Durcan’s voice first some time in the late 1970s. It was the poetry programme presented on RTÉ Radio 1 by Eavan Boland. He listed the things in Ireland which gave him nightmares. I seem to remember, although I might be wrong, that he included the IDA – the Industrial Development Authority – in the list.
This gave me pleasure since I had, as a way of keeping my dole, been forced to do an interview for a job with the IDA. The interview had given me nightmares. Durcan’s list was both funny and filled with savage indignation. His tone was not like anybody else’s, but it did not seem invented or false in any way. It marked him out.
At Listowel Writers’ Week a year or two afterwards he was drinking rock shandies. I noticed that he went to bed early. He was hesitant when he spoke. When he was funny, it was despite himself, and this could make him very funny indeed.
But he was often preoccupied; more often, however, he was filled with enthusiasm over a book or a poem he had read, or a new writer, or an old one, or a painting. He liked sport, including hurling.
The first time I heard him read was in Listowel and it was electrifying. There was a melancholy beyond words in his appearance and his voice but this was tempered with a fierce sense of comedy.
Often the two met and matched. But sometimes he allowed one to dominate at precisely the point when you least expected it. The poems were filled with life, but life filtered through an imagination that was not only original, but also questing, self-searching in a way which was almost religious.
Had he gone silent then (and when you read him on the page you notice how the poems have as much treasured silence in them as they do words), had he not written anything after, say, Jesus, Break His Fallin 1980, he would still have had an honoured place in the pantheon of Irish poets. But the books that came later – the poems about paintings, about the break-up of his marriage, about the deaths of his parents, about himself and his country – have enriched our lives and been a constant surprise in their honesty, their restlessness, their harmonies, their refusal to lie down.
Colm Tóibín's novel, Brooklyn, has been shortlisted for the Costa Prize.
IVOR BROWNE
Paul Durcan, who is to be awarded an honorary degree in Trinity College shortly, which he richly deserves, is without doubt one of our greatest living poets, but it is when you hear him reading his poetry that you really appreciate his genius. The words seem to come alive when he reads, in a way that I can never fully make happen when I read them on my own. He is such a gentle, self-effacing person when you are with him at ordinary times, but when he gives a reading the full strength of his personality comes forth.
Although I had been reading his work for many years and enjoying it greatly, the first time I went to actually hear him read, (I think it was in the National Gallery), I had just returned from a trip to India and was jet-lagged and exhausted. I was falling asleep and thought I would never be able to stay awake to hear him.
But as soon as he started to speak all my fatigue left me and I was carried away into another dream world, absolutely fascinated. I never forgot that experience and have availed of every opportunity to hear him read his poetry ever since.It was only in the Past few years that I met him personally, but since then, I hope I can say that we have become true friends, and I value his friendship more than I can say. He has undoubtedly suffered greatly throughout his life, but then that is the way of genius.
In the wonderful TV documentary made about his life by Alan Gilsenan, he described how he was dragged out of O’Donoghues pub, where he had been hanging out with “undesirables” like Patrick Kavanagh and other writers, and put into St John of God’s psychiatric hospital. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, given shock therapy and a doctor told him: “I’ve seen some bad people, Paul, but you’re the worst”.
His worst terror was that he might be subjected to a lobotomy, but this, thank God, never happened. In spite of this outrageous ill-treatment, he survived to become one of the most creative poets this country has produced.
On the occasion of my 80th birthday he wrote a beautiful poem for me and my wife June Levine, who sadly had died the previous year, which I will treasure for the years remaining to me.
Ivor Browne is one of Ireland's best-known psychiatrists. His memoir, Music and Madness, was published by Cork University Press in 2008.
For information about the Paul Durcan symposium at Trinity College, Dublin, see www.tcd.ie/about/conferences. All events free and open to the public, but spaces are limited. Early attendance is advised to avoid disappointment.
