Paul Durcan’s bibliography is vast. For over four decades, between the appearance of his first solo collection O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor (1975) to Wild, Wild Erie (2016), he published a new book of poems nearly every two years. Along the way, important selections charted his development. Edna Longley’s still indispensable Selected Paul Durcan (1982) was followed a decade later by A Snail in My Prime (1993). In 2009, the magisterial Life Is a Dream: Forty Years Reading Poems, a kind of interim collected poems, was published. In addition to the poetry, there have been books in prose, including Paul Durcan’s Diary (2003) and the lectures he delivered as Ireland Chair of Poetry (2004-7), gathered in The Poet’s Chair (2008). To his many book-length publications, which go back to the 1960s, we might add the thousands of public readings and interviews that have made Durcan’s work known and admired wherever poetry is appreciated.
Among those Irish writers who have shown appreciation for Durcan’s work, including Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Paula Meehan, and Caitríona O’Reilly, Colm Tóibín has played a central role. His edited collection of essays, The Kilfenora Teaboy (1996), set an important precedent for critical engagement with Durcan’s work. Tóibín’s introduction to 80 at 80 flags many of the poet’s recurring concerns, such as his “dispute with the Church and religion” and Durcan’s passionate, unwavering rejection of “the politics of hate”.
Never partisan, Durcan’s poems speak against violence on all sides, especially in Ireland, not just in the public sphere but also in the home. “Ireland 1972″ summarises the tragedy of the Troubles in a way that is a testament to the imaginative power of the poet and his formidable verbal control: “Next to the fresh grave of my belovèd grandmother / The grave of my first love murdered by my brother.” Only a poet with a deep understanding of poetic language could tackle such a theme with such deft formal economy. It also demonstrates Durcan’s profound sensitivity to historical reality.
A master of lyric timing – as one might expect of a poet famed for his readings – Durcan is also a brilliant ventriloquist, capturing in his poems the voices and forms of speech that occur in our daily lives. In his introduction to 80 at 80, Tóibín emphasises “the artistry” of Durcan’s poems. This, of course, is why we read Durcan’s poetry, not because of what his poems say but how they say it. Or, because of the way that Durcan has managed, often in the face of immense public and personal crises, to remain true to his art, to continue making poems and publishing books through times of uncertainty and loss. Many of the poems in 80 at 80 – and throughout Durcan’s œuvre – appear to describe personal experience in harrowing detail: poems about the breakdown of a marriage (“Hymn to a Broken Marriage”), the death of a parent (“Glocca Morra”), the experience of mental illness, homelessness, or unemployment (“Interview for a Job”). Through it all, as he writes in The Death by Heroin of Sid Vicious: “There – but for the clutch of luck – go we all.”
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While the poems are often heartbreaking in their depictions of human frailty, Durcan is also one of the greatest poets in any language to write about the importance of forgiveness and love. There is comedy, sometimes, in his descriptions of the self “All caught up in a huge romance,” as he puts it in “The Beckett at the Gate,” but there is great tenderness, too, in the way that he can admit failure as a man, a husband, a father. At their best, his poems afford an important riposte to the culture of male violence that is everywhere evident in society today. We need to read him now, perhaps, more than ever.
Writing about Michael Hartnett, Durcan has said that “the writing of poetry was a vocation, an all-or-nothing calling.” 80 at 80 demonstrates the truth of that calling for Durcan himself. In certain respects, his works have been groundbreaking. He is one of the greatest ekphrastic poets of the last century. The skill with which he has handled the relationship between the private self and the public sphere, and his opening up of the idea of poetry in performance, have been hugely influential to younger poets. His sense of the way that poetry can be both a record of the world and, at the same time, stay true to its own sovereign sense of the word, is constant. Niall MacMonagle has done a remarkable job in selecting eighty poems from the poet’s enormous corpus to include in a book that is so much more than another “selection” of Durcan’s work. 80 at 80 is also a reminder – and an affirmation – of Paul Durcan’s singular contribution not just to Irish poetic culture but the broader world of contemporary poetry.
Philip Coleman is a Professor in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin.
