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\nI just heard the news that acclaimed poet Paul Durcan has died at the age of 80. The couple of obits I’ve read have been fairly obligatory although I am sure there will be more in-depth pieces as the news spread. In the meantime Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn wrote a beautiful piece<\/a> on him last year when Durcan turned 80. I love this part: <\/p>\n But the poems can also be daring, directly personal as well as directly political. It is hard to think of another poet in these islands who has written such searing poems against violence and cruelty and the politics of hate. It is also difficult to think of another male poet who has written such brave works of self-examination. In his poems about his father, for example, or his marriage, or his solitude, Paul Durcan manages a desolation mixed with a fierce generosity of spirit, a hard-won sense of healing edged and tempered by an equally hard-won sense of loss and despondency.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Paul Durcan’s poems are chatty, lots of voices, often hilarious. The titles are sometimes lengthy: “The Divorce Referendum, Ireland, 1986”, or “Irish Hierarchy Bans Colour Photography”. The humor sharpens the points he was making. Like his poem “Tullynoe: Tete-\u00e0-Tete in the Parish Priest\u2019s Parlour” … you yearn to hear him perform it. <\/p>\n Tullynoe: Tete-\u00e0-Tete in the Parish Priest\u2019s Parlour<\/big> 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 essentially kidnapped him and put him in an institution where the treatment for mental illness was barbaric. He was drugged up and given electric shock therapy. 45 years later Durcan said: <\/p>\n 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<\/em>. 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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The “cure” made him sicker. He was very open about his struggle with depression. <\/p>\n His mother was John MacBride’s niece. MacBride, of course, was one of the martyrs of the 1916 Irish revolution, who married Maud Gonne (after he was executed, she, famously, wore widow’s weeds for the rest of her wild life). Durcan was born into this mythical Irish atmosphere. <\/p>\n 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” haunted him and he continued to write beautiful love poems for his wife after they split). His wife worked in a prison, and so Durcan was the stay-at-home dad. He wrote poetry as the children played around him – and I think you can tell. (This is a compliment). He held the post of “Professor of Poetry” in Ireland, a national trust. <\/p>\n His live readings were legendary. Imagine hearing him read “Tullynoe: Tete-\u00e0-Tete in the Parish Priest\u2019s Parlour”. I am so sorry I didn’t go to one of his readings at the Irish Arts Center, but there are clips of him on YouTube. Caitriona O’Reilly describes the effect Durcan had on an audience in this piece in The Guardian<\/a>:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Here’s audio of him reading at the Irish Arts Center, in New York: <\/p>\n \n
\n\u201cAh, he was a grand man.\u201d
\n\u201cHe was: he fell out of the train going to Sligo.\u201d
\n\u201cHe did: he thought he was going to the lavatory.\u201d
\n\u201cHe did: in fact he stepped out of the rear door of the train.\u201d
\n\u201cHe did: God, he must have got an awful fright.\u201d
\n\u201cHe did: he saw that it wasn\u2019t the lavatory at all.\u201d
\n\u201cHe did: he saw that it was the railway tracks going away from him.\u201d
\n\u201cHe did: I wonder if … but he was a grand man.\u201d
\n\u201cHe was: he had the most expensive Toyota you can buy.\u201d
\n\u201cHe had: well, it was only beautiful.\u201d
\n\u201cIt was: he used to have an Audi.\u201d
\n\u201cHe had: as a matter of fact he used to have two Audis.\u201d
\n\u201cHe had: and then he had an Avenger.\u201d
\n\u201cHe had: and then he had a Volvo.\u201d
\n\u201cHe had: in the beginning he had a lot of Volkses.\u201d
\n\u201cHe had: he was a great man for the Volkses.\u201d
\n\u201cHe was: did he once have an Escort?\u201d
\n\u201cHe had not: he had a son a doctor.\u201d
\n\u201cHe had: and he had a Morris Minor too.\u201d
\n\u201cHe had: he had a sister a hairdresser in Kilmallock.\u201d
\n\u201cHe had: he had another sister a hairdresser in Ballybunion.\u201d
\n\u201cHe had: he was put in a coffin which was put in his father\u2019s cart.\u201d
\n\u201cHe was: his lady wife sat on top of the coffin driving the donkey.\u201d
\n\u201cShe did: Ah, but he was a grand man.\u201d
\n\u201cHe was: he was a grand man\u2026\u201d
\n\u201cGood night, Father.\u201d
\n\u201cGood night, Mary.\u201d<\/p>\n