DURCAN, Paul (1944- ), poet.
Born in Dublin on 16 October 1944 of Co. Mayo parents, Paul Durcan's childhood was divided between the family home in Ranelagh and summer vacations with his aunt and maternal grandmother in the west of Ireland. The importance of these and other key locales is a definitive feature of Durcan's poetry, and informs a poetics of place that extends to include Russia, Australia and the Americas. After graduating from Gonzaga College in 1962, Durcan enrolled in Economics and History at University College, Dublin. During the following year he established lasting friendships with a group of writers and intellectuals including Michael Hartnett, Leland Bardwell, Macdara Woods, John Moriarty and, most importantly in terms of his writing, Patrick Kavanagh. An initial collection of poetry, Endsville, was published in 1967, and after a short period in London Durcan married Nessa O'Neill and the couple returned to Ireland with their two daughters to live in Cork. In 1974 he graduated with first class honours in Archaeology and Medieval History from University College, Cork, and in the same year was the recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award, an honour which enabled the publication of his first major collection, O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor (1975). In the course of the past 30 years he has published 18 volumes of poetry, each one charting new territory in terms of its rhythms and subject matter. An utterly inimitable voice, Durcan has written the most public yet also the most private poems to come out of contemporary Ireland. The Selected Paul Durcan (1982) concentrated the poet's outrage at the Irish hierarchy and the atrocities taking place in Northern Ireland, while with unflinching self-disclosure The Berlin Wall Café (1985) addressed the breakdown of his marriage and Daddy, Daddy, the 1990 winner of the Whitbread Poetry Prize, offered a candid, masterful exploration of the father-son relationship. Subsequent collections have included Crazy About Women (1991) and Give Me Your Hand (1994), collaborations with the National Gallery of Ireland and the National Gallery in London respectively, A Snail in My Prime (1993), a definitive new and selected edition, Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (1999) and Cries of an Irish Caveman (2001). While he is frequently regarded as an iconoclastic social critic of Irish, and latterly American, social, political and religious institutions and hypocrisies, Durcan is as much a poet of praise as he is a satirist. Complex, incantatory hymns laud society's unacknowledged 'holy souls' and extol exemplary individuals, many of them women. Durcan's recitals of his work, a unique blend of orature and theatrics, rapidly gained him a wide popular and academic audience in Ireland and Europe. A residency at the Frost Place at Franconia, New Hampshire in May 1985 followed by reading tours in Canada, the United States and Brazil introduced him to a new and enthusiastic readership. In 1989 he received the Irish American Cultural Institute Poetry Award and in 1995 was joint winner of the Heinemann Award. Durcan has been Writer in Residence at Trinity College, Dublin (1990), at University College, Dublin (2003), and in 2004 he was appointed to the Ireland Chair of Poetry.
While the focus of Durcan's poetry is Ireland, he is equally attuned to international politics and social change. In particular, his engagement with all things American has been passionate and life-long. As he confirmed in a recent radio broadcast, 'Since I was 5…since I saw my first Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy films, I have been a devotee at the shrine of American culture: cinema, music, painting, history, sport and literature. I have had the good fortune to visit the US seven times: my beloved land of Muhammed Ali and the Harlem Globetrotters; of Jean Kennedy Smith and her fabled brothers; of Ella Fitzgerald, Marilyn Munroe and F.Scott Fitzgerald; of Arthur Miller and Robert Zimmerman and Tiger Woods.' This 'devotion' manifests in the poetry in a number of ways. Formally, his long lines and open, variable metrics salute Whitman and Ginsberg, while his bluesy refrains and lyrics of social protest owe as much to Robert Johnson and Howlin' Wolf as they do to Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. In terms of subject, early poems such as 'Were He Alive' and 'Black Sister' implicitly engage with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, championing as they do humanist values and racial equality. Later works show an acute awareness of the painful legacy of Irish emigration to the Americas. Like 'Backside to the Wind' with its poignant lament - 'I have no choice but to leave, to leave,/And yet there is nowhere I more yearn to live/Than in my own wild countryside' - 'The Girl with the Keys to Pearse's Cottage' speaks of a Connemara postman's daughter who 'was America-bound at summer's end./She had no choice but to leave her home', and the exquisite 'Loosestrife in Ballyferriter' voices one woman's plaintive keen: 'Iowa doesn't want me and I don't want Iowa./Why must I forsake Ireland for Iowa?' Whether chronicling his trans-Atlantic crossings ('EI Flight 106: New York - Dublin', 'Flying Over the Kamloops'), evoking media figures from Bugs Bunny to Ronald Reagan ('That vulturous-looking man in the States'), or comic-ironically positioning himself in Dublin as 'the centre of the universe', phone-counselling acquaintances as far away as Los Angeles, Sao Paulo and New York, Durcan has built up a network of connections between Ireland and the Americas that bespeaks a rich and complex post-modern fabric of cultural exchange.
It is in his 1999 collection, Greeting to Our Friends in Brazil, however, that Durcan enters into his most full-blown poetic dialogue with North and South America. As the title poem signals, the volume is a plea for inter-cultural communication and, by extension, the kinds of conversation which destabilise fixed notions about gender, race and nationality. A reading tour of Brazil in the spring of 1995 occasioned the opening sequence, which explores literary as well as social and religious connections between Ireland and Brazil. The book also includes a series of 'self-portraits', amongst them 'The Chicago Waterstone's', a characteristically humorous recollection of a reunion with the young woman who was the poet's 'Monitor' at the Frost Place, but also a frank account of the frequently fraught discourse between men and women. The book's final section, devoted as it is to the years of Mary Robinson's Presidency, contains three poems honouring Jean Kennedy Smith, American Ambassador to Ireland 1993-98 . While paying tribute to Jean Kennedy Smith's work and person, Durcan also aligns her role as ambassador with that of the poet: 'A poet…is an ambassador/Who is the carrier of the significant messages/Across frontiers, checkpoints, walls, controls.' In Durcan's ethos, the significant message is that negotiation, compromise and mutual understanding are crucial to humanity's survival. Throughout his writing career he has sought, most recently in a series of radio talks broadcast by RTE Radio 1's Today with Pat Kenny program and published as Paul Durcan's Diary (2003), to convey precisely that imperative. His indignation at the Bush administration's foreign policy in the Middle East, the invasion of Iraq, and the incarceration of political prisoners at Guantanamo Bay constitute his harshest criticism of, and his most sustained engagement with, the United States to date. At the same time, he is as magnanimous in his admiration for a Manhattan Yellow Cab driver and the courteous customs of the citizens of St John's, Newfoundland as he is in his respect for the pacifist politics of the American Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray. In a poem dedicated to Durcan, Derek Mahon writes:
Oh, Holderlin no fly would hurt,
Our vagabond and pilgrim spirit,
Give us a ring on your way back
And tell us what the nations lack!
As poet-ambassador to the Americas and beyond, Durcan's message to the nations is straightforward: suaimhneas - sweet peace.
Select Bibliography
Paul Durcan, O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor. Dublin; Anna Livia Books, 1975; rev.ed. London: Harvill, 1995.
---, The Berlin Wall Café. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1985; rev.ed. London: Harvill, 1995.
---, Daddy, Daddy. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1990.
---, A Snail in My Prime: New and Selected Poems. London: Harvill, 1993.
---, Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil. London: Harvill, 1999.
---, Cries of an Irish Caveman. London: Harvill, 2001.
---, Paul Durcan's Diary. Dublin: New Island Books, 2003.
Clom Toibin, (ed.) The Kilfenora Teaboy: A Study of Paul Durcan. Dublin: New Island Books, 1996.