God, I love this guy (born on this day)
Durcan’s poems are chatty, observant, scathing, often very funny. His poems sometimes have long funny titles: “The Divorce Referendum, Ireland, 1986”, or “Irish Hierarchy Bans Colour Photography”. He has a strong sense of the absurdity of life, and mercilessly makes fun of prudes and moralists.
He had a rather horrifying time of it as a young man. His father was a judge, and their relationship was very challenging. To please this difficult man, Durcan went to UCD to study law, but whatever happened his first year in college was traumatic and his family kidnapped him and institutionalized him. He was drugged up and given electric shock therapy. 45 years later Durcan said:
I ended up in St John of God in a ridiculous way. There was nothing the matter with me. I’m sure you saw the film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Well, I was one of the luckier ones, one of the ones who flew over the cuckoo’s nest and survived it. I didn’t get a leucotomy, which would have finished me off completely, but I did get massive amounts of barbiturates, the whole Mandrax and every lethal tablet you could ever name. I think I came out of it with a kind of melancholia.”
The “cure” made him sicker. He is very open about his struggle with depression.
His mother was the niece of John MacBride, one of the martyrs of the 1916 Irish revolution. MacBride married Maud Gonne. Durcan was born into this, the myth of Ireland’s martyrdom was in his own home.
Once he got out of the mental institution, he was free to go his own way at last. He got married and had a couple of kids (the marriage fell apart in 1984: this “failure” continues to haunt him). His wife worked in a prison, so Durcan was the stay-at-home dad for their daughters. He wrote poetry as they played around him. He is, to this day, a very popular poet, and held the post of “Professor of Poetry” in Ireland, a national trust. Caitriona O’Reilly describes the effect Durcan has on an audience in this piece in The Guardian:
Hilarity has always been Paul Durcan’s stock-in-trade. Anyone who has attended one of his electrifying poetry readings and been reduced to hysteria (a common enough occurrence) can testify to the unique flavour of his work, especially when read aloud by the poet himself. That voice, with its peculiar, precise sibilance, its mock-solemnity, its quavering rise and fall, is the voice that remains in your head when reading his poems afterwards. He is one of the few poets honest enough to admit (as did the hieratic TS Eliot) that poetry is a form of entertainment, yet intelligent enough to know that entertainment does not mean “cheap”. His populism, his popularity, as a poet are unusual – comparable only to that favour enjoyed in Ireland by his venerated contemporary Seamus Heaney.
Here’s audio of him reading at the Irish Arts Center, in New York:
I love so many of his poems: There’s the one about the Pieta: how does he make it so funny? Yet it’s really about an overbearing mother’s love. Saying to Jesus, essentially: “You have to get up, friend, grow up, and leave your mother’s knee, mkay?”
There’s also this one.
Going Home to Mayo, Winter, 1949
Leaving behind us the alien, foreign city of Dublin
My father drove through the night in an old Ford Anglia,
His five-year-old son in the seat beside him,
The rexine seat of red leatherette,
And a yellow moon peered in through the windscreen.
‘Daddy, Daddy,’ I cried, ‘Pass out the moon,’
But no matter how hard he drove he could not pass out the moon.
Each town we passed through was another milestone
And their names were magic passwords into eternity:
Kilcock, Kinnegad, Strokestown, Elphin,
Tarmonbarry, Tulsk, Ballaghaderreen, Ballavarry;
Now we were in Mayo and the next stop was Turlough,
The village of Turlough in the heartland of Mayo,
And my father’s mother’s house, all oil-lamps and women,
And my bedroom over the public bar below,
And in the morning cattle-cries and cock-crows:
Life’s seemingly seamless garment gorgeously rent
By their screeches and bellowings. And in the evenings
I walked with my father in the high grass down by the river
Talking with him – an unheard-of thing in the city.
But home was not home and the moon could be no more outflanked
Than the daylight nightmare of Dublin city:
Back down along the canal we chugged into the city
And each lock-gate tolled our mutual doom;
And railings and palings and asphalt and traffic-lights,
And blocks after blocks of so-called ‘new’ tenements –
Thousands of crosses of loneliness planted
In the narrowing grave of the life of the father;
In the wide, wide cemetery of the boy’s childhood.
Interestingly, he wrote a long tribute poem to Micheál MacLiammóir, a man I have written about before, usually in connection with his lifelong friend Orson Welles. (MacLiammóir was Iago to Welles’ Othello in Welles’ film.) MacLiammóir is a fascinating man, himself, and it is not a surprise at all that he and Welles would be so close. Masters of self-invention, both of them. Micheál MacLiammóir created the great Gate Theatre in Dublin, to compete with and rival the revered Abbey. He came from a new generation, he had other ideas about theatre. The Gate is still going strong. It is just one of this man’s legacies. I have posted before his fantastic essay about film acting. A brilliant actor, a showman, someone who basically adopted Ireland as his homeland by force of will and imagination. A fabulist, because he wasn’t of Irish birth at all. !!! Here he is with Orson Welles and Eartha Kitt in 1950:
MacLiammóir died in March 1978, and Paul Durcan wrote this poem immediately as a tribute. It is in MacLiammóir’s voice, gossipy and humorous, and it is glorious.
Micheál MacLiammóir
‘Dear Boy, What a superlative day for a funeral:
It seems St Stephen’s Green put on the appareil
Of early Spring-time especially for me.
That is no vanity: but – dare I say it – humility
In the fell face of those nay-neighers who say we die
At dying-time. Die? Why, I must needs cry
No, no, no, no,
Now I am living whereas before – no –
‘Twas but breathing, choking, croaking, singing,
Superb sometimes but nevertheless but breathing:
You should have seen the scene in University Church:
Packed to the hammer-beams with me left in the lurch
All on my ownio up-front centre-stage;
People of every nationality in Ireland and of every age;
Old age and youth – Oh, everpresent, oldest, wished-for youth;
And old Dublin ladies telling their beads for old me; forsooth.
‘Twould have fired the cockles of John Henry’s heart
And his mussels too: only Sarah Bernhardt
Was missing but I was so glad to see Marie Conmee
Fresh, as always, as the morning sea.
We paid a last farewell to dear Harcourt Terrace,
Dear old, bedgraggled, doomed Harcourt Terrace
Where I enjoyed, amongst the crocuses, a Continual Glimpse of Heaven
By having, for a living partner, Hilton.
Around the corner the canal-waters from Athy gleamed
Engaged in their never-ending courtship of Ringsend.
Then onward to the Gate – and to the rose-cheeked ghost of Edward Longford;
I could not bear to look at Patrick Bedford.
Oh tears there were, there and everywhere,
But especially there; there outside the Gate where
For fifty years we wooed the goddess of our art;
How many, many nights she pierced my heart.
Ach, níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin: 1
The Gate and the Taibhdhearc – each was our name;
I dreamed a dream of Jean Cocteau
Leaning against a wall in Killnamoe;
And so I voyaged through all the nations of Ireland with McMaster
And played in Cinderella an ugly, but oh so ugly, sister.
Ah but we could not tarry for ever outside the Gate;
Life, as always, must go on or we’d be late
For my rendezvous with my brave grave-diggers
Who were as shy but snappy as my best of dressers.
We sped past the vast suburb of Clontarf – all those lives
Full of hard-working Brian Borús with their busy wives.
In St Fintan’s Cemetery there was spray from the sea
As well as from the noonday sun, and clay on me:
And a green carnation on my lonely oaken coffin.
Lonely in heaven? Yes, I must not soften
The deep pain I feel at even a momentary separation
From my dear, sweet friends. A green carnation
For you all, dear boy; If you must weep, ba(w)ll;
Slán agus Beannacht:2 Micheál.’
March 1978
1 But there’s no place like home.
2 Farewell.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
