Poet Paul Durcan uses poetry to criticise but doesn’t want offend
T COULD be the title of one of Paul Durcanâs compositions â âThe Poet Apologises For The Horribleness Of His Poemsâ.
But thatâs what Durcan does as he flicks through his new collection, asking tentatively for an opinion on two of the poems he worried about including.
âIrish Bankers Shoot Dead Fifty-Seven Homeless Childrenâ is an angry commentary on the grotesque behaviours of the Celtic Tiger, while â1916 Not To Be Commemoratedâ is a satirical lament on the loss of idealism and independence.
Given all that has been written and ranted on these subjects in the last few years, Durcanâs concern seems excessive, but he is adamant that he doesnât want to upset unnecessarily.
âOne of my uncles was a lovely man, who came from a family with nothing, in Co. Cork, and joined the bank, like so many people did at 17, as a clerk. I canât stress too much what a lovely man he was and he ended up being a bank manager.
âI feel a bit guilty in relation to good men like him. Itâs too awful to contemplate if he was to read that.
âTo me, itâs a horrible poem, but I had to put it in. It had to be there. I am constantly brooding on those two poems, about, you know, âitâs so awful that should I put them inâ?
âThereâs another one that I think is a horrible poem, to tell you the truth,â he says, referring to âMeeting The Great Consultantâ, about the indignity of an invasive procedure carried out by an arrogant doctor.
âI ask him a question, but he ignores me â after all/He is a consultant and consultants do not consult,/Certainly not with a patient.â
It is followed by âThe W.B. Yeats Shopping Centreâ, a humorous, but nonetheless scathing, depiction of commercialism gone mad.
âIn the Luggage Department/I purchased a suitcase with wheels./Medium-size. Scarlet-red./Toilet-trained. Guaranteed.â
Yet for all the currency of these themes, Durcan is anxious that they should not dominate. âI donât want to engage in polemic,â he says.
He shouldnât worry.
The Days Of Surprise, his new collection, has 67 poems spanning his 70 years and a rich variety of topics and thoughts.
The title refers to a phrase Durcan found in Italian media in the weeks following the unpredicted election of the unpredictable Pope Francis, an event he celebrates in joyous verse.
Other surprises punctuate the pages â unexpectedly finding himself in the arms of a woman, at an age when he thought such frolics were past him, discovering the handsome walking cane of the late actor, David Kelly, in his post; the arrival of a good and feisty friend, just when one was desperately needed.
Surprising, too, for the reader is the fact that Durcan can still mine his childhood for new material, despite his frequent visits there in his many previous publications.
â57 Dartmouth Squareâ celebrates his childhood home and the importance of physical landmarks as signposts to significant memories. âFirst Mixed Partyâ juxtaposes the thrill of an adolescent dalliance with the pettiness of adult nit-picking, and âYouthâ captures the pain of yearning for an indifferent girl.
âHardly a day goes by that you donât think of your own childhood, but, as you get older, things may come back even more,â says Durcan, explaining that he rarely has to go searching for his past, as it tends to present itself to him.
âYour mother and your father are always on your mind. Theyâre always coming back and bringing all your childhood experiences with them,â he says.
The theme of death recurs throughout the collection â from the loss of war reporter, Marie Colvin, amid the shell-wrecked streets of Syria to the passing of old friends and relatives back home. But Durcan says the subject doesnât preoccupy him.
âThere are quite a number of elegies, but thatâs life and the nature of life as the years pass by and friends go. You wouldnât be human if you didnât think of death,â he says.
Durcan says he lingered on thoughts of his own demise in just two poems, âIl Bambino Domienteâ and âMeeting Mother In The Big Oâ.
âI wouldnât be honest if I didnât say that, down the second-half of my life, the thought or the question of taking your own life has passed through my mind, both arising in myself and in seeing tragedy in other peopleâs lives.
âWithout being morbid, I always loved sport, from day one to now, and clearly Iâm on the last lap now. In the mile, there are four laps of the track and, in that sense, Iâm on the last lap. Thatâs how it is.â
Durcan canât be accused of morbidity, because there is much in the book to suggest he still gets a tremendous kick out of life, even when it is at its most ridiculous.
Durcan repeatedly praises women â whether he be whimsically lusting after RTĂâs female weather presenters, or in awe of the sacrifice of mothers, or cheering on boxer Katie Taylor.
âIf I was writing now, I would include Stephanie Roche because â well, itâs obvious â but also because she seems to really embody that idea of being the salt of the earth.â
With a broken marriage long behind him, Durcan also has a healthy envy for successful partnerships â he even adds Taoiseach Enda Kenny and his wife, Fionnuala, to the list, during one of his distinctive rhapsodies, which he joking describes as his âjazz solosâ.
Durcan also includes his old friend, President Michael D Higgins and his wife, Sabina, though mention of them hits a nerve of frustration with the media, which niggles several times throughout the book.
âI know Michael D as a fellow poet. I first met him at a poetry reading in the 1970s. Iâve forgotten whether I was reading or he was reading, but it was in Galway, out in Clifden âIt depresses me that people â I suppose Iâm talking about the media â donât report this more seriously. I have seen reports where they say âalleged poetâ or have somebody saying that he isnât really a poet at all and that really is a knife in my back, because it couldnât be more untrue.â
It worries Durcan that cutbacks threaten the arts, and he says that while The Days Of Surprise is not grant-aided, many of his previous works were. âBut for the grants that I was so fortunate to receive, I would not have been able to write,â he says.
In â1916 Not To Be Commemoratedâ, he sees the poets silenced by the outlawing of expression in any form other than âcelebrity clichĂ©, media jargon, smart-speakâ.
âI was just thinking, the other day, what could we do on this Easter Monday, 2016, and Iâm trying to be somehow reasonable and I wouldnât like to get into a public polemic about it.
âBut I was thinking, maybe just five minutesâ silence, where everything stops, apart from utterly essential services. Just complete silence.
âAnd no poetry readings. But no firing of cannon, either.â
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