"A Cast-Iron Excuse", a two-line poem from Paul Durcan's latest collection, runs: "Sorry I cannot come to your reading tonight. / I have to go to the South Pole." The sentiment may strike a chord with even the most dedicated poetry-reading fans; but it's not an excuse likely to be needed by those lucky enough to have attended one of Durcan's own readings. When he published Life Is a Dream three years ago, an expansive "selected" poems, it was tellingly subtitled 40 Years Reading Poems. "I dread the act of reading," he says in the preface to that book, "but I know that public reading is the life blood of the art of poetry." One of the few genuinely popular poets of recent decades, a vital presence in Irish culture even if not its most illustrious name, Durcan is a charismatic performer whose voice, once heard, haunts the printed pages of his books. If there were a prize for the best reader of one's own poems, he would probably win it hands down.
If there were another for the strangest titles, he might scoop that one, too. Always an outspoken commentator in his poetry on Irish political and cultural affairs, Durcan's "headline" titles, particularly from the 1970s and 80s "Wife Who Smashed Television Gets Jail", or "Irish Hierarchy Bans Colour Photography" can be wickedly subversive of received pieties. In Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being, fat cat executives "The bank robbers double-vent bonus boys" come under scrutiny in poems that celebrate the resilience of the human spirit. As one elderly woman announces: "I lost my pension To that gang of tight-bottomed, piotious, creeping Jesuses in Allied Irish Banks. / What does it matter? / I am eighty-two and I am as new as a snowdrop."
He also has a number of wonderful poems which do what they say on the tin: "Today I Met David Kelly, Actor, in the Street"; "To Dympna Who Taught Me Online Banking"; or, in a mischievous paean to chicklit, "On Glimpsing a Woman in Hodges Figgis Bookshop in Dublin". The woman, who signs copies of her own book when she finds them on the shelf ("I was just passing"), is celebrity novelist Amanda Brunker." The first thing I think," writes Durcan, "is that Amanda Brunker is mortal. / The second thing I think is that Amanda Brunker is a looker. / The third thing I think is: Roll over Jane Austen!"
Some of Durcan's tales and encounters are, like this one, so bizarre they must be true. Some of them are so bizarre, they cannot possibly be true. He slips effortlessly from the real to the surreal, often to superb comic effect. In "Michael Longley's Last Poetry Reading", the reading is given by "A pair of red braces / with a white beard", since the poet himself is "detained / By two Vermeer women / In a nearby restaurant / called The Pig's Ear".
Durcan the teller of tall tales is on fine form in this book: entertaining, edgy, and with enough ironic self-awareness to make from such quirky subjects more than superficial reflections on his life and times. He is also as likely to slip (for example in "The Lamb around My Neck") from the comic to the parabolic, in the manner of Louis MacNeice's last poems. If he is most evidently gifted in these kinds of narrative poems, and in his capacity to reveal the essential oddness at the heart of everyday encounters, he also counterpoints this relaxed style and idiom with occasional poems of concentrated lyricism that "sing" more than they "tell", and with some beautifully worked and heartfelt elegies. "Death of a Corkman" is one of these, transforming cliché into lyric: "He was a place not a time: / He was a street corner in rush hour, / His laughing eyes looking sideways He was a private man in a public place".
That last phrase could speak to Durcan himself, too. The title of this collection reworks Acts 17:28: "For in Him we live and move and have our being". Durcan's "praise", ultimately, is for people those he meets every day, those he misses; the artists who inspire him; the man who cuts his hair; Dympna or Amanda (or women generally); "The Docker at Eighty Walking his Dog in the Snow". But for praise one might also read poems, as the places in which the poet has his being, through which he makes sense of, and still delights in, the world around him. He writes well about being alone, about "the original, terminal isolation of [the] mortal soul" ("The Spirit that Lives Alone"), and it's possible to see this flood of poems (more than 80 of them) as a kind of writing over or through loneliness, a compulsive need to listen and to talk.
Durcan publishes more poems than most, not on the principle that they all have equal value, or that they are all "worthy of preservation", but because it is the poet's task, as he sees it, at least to record what we would otherwise forget. At his best, Durcan is the recording angel who preserves what could be lost, who brings tidings of change in some of the darker moments of history. The clues are all there in "Morning Ireland, Be Warned!", where "cast as the Angel Gabriel / In the school Christmas play", he refuses to "take off [his] wings" afterwards, even though they might "get in the way of things". "I am going to stay being the Angel Gabriel / For all of my life!"
Fran Brearton is editing The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry.
