Wily chronicler of an Ireland yearning to be reborn

For decades Paul Durcan has mapped our Free State as it descended into Hell. No other poet was so well-prepared for this prolonged and bitter cartography. Thomas McCarthy on his latest collection

Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being

Paul Durcan

Harvill Secker; £12.50

VETERAN readers of the Irish Examiner will remember the marvellous contributions of UCC graduate, Paul Durcan, in this paper some decades ago.

In what now seems a golden era of Patrick Galvin and Bobby O’Donoghue, Durcan contributed his generous thoughts on poets and poetry, on art and life. He was already a published poet then, having seen Endsville through the press in 1967.

But within years of those Cork Examiner columns Durcan would rise to Parnassian greatness with The Berlin Wall Café and Going Home to Russia. Poetry Book Society Choice, Whitbread and Cholmondeley Prizes as well as a massive reading public attending to his unique fame and public persona.

But fame came, ironically, to an intensely private man whose terror of having attention drawn to himself is cleverly admitted in the first poem of this new collection. He watches the popular novelist, Amanda Brunker, signing her books (without invitation) in the Hodges Figgis bookshop:

‘The third thing I think is: Roll over Jane Austen!What cunning, what audacity, what breezy, cool arrogance!’

Marvelling at the confidence of the very young, he writes

‘Methinks I tick too much.’

In later poems, such as ‘The Lady in Weirs’ or ‘To Dympna Who Taught Me Online Banking’, he comes face to face with an older, less competent self, a spirit that lives alone. Those who live alone, the homeless, the imprisoned, the maternal and the saintly, all populate this book of praise and elegy. In ‘Post-haste to John Moriarty, Easter Sunday, 2007’ he captures that sense of spiritual journeying, that peace in being near someone holy who leads the Stations of the Cross:

‘And I could hear you, John, Among their cadences,Their luscious crevices,Your torrential whispers,Et egressus est Jesus cum discipulus suis transTorrentem Cedron.’

The spiritual formation of the poet, those preambles and prayers that punctuate a devout Christian life, are an essential part of Durcan’s texture and textile. The title of this latest book is taken from the liturgical world, coming as it does from Acts 17:28 — ‘For in Him we live and move and have our being’, though Paul Durcan must have derived more specific comfort from the prophet’s subsequent phrase ‘as also some of your own poets have said ‘For we are also His offspring’.

Durcan was born during the Emergency into a privileged legal family with strong Mayo Fine Gael connections to the first Free State government. Elaborately educated and spiritually formed, he is one of the most complex Irishmen ever to put pen to paper.

To find his equal, one would have to read Father Prout, Seán Ó Fáoláin or James Joyce. There is no doubt, both socially and spiritually, that one can take the Jesuit boy from Gonzaga but one cannot remove Gonzaga from the learned poet. His fall out of heaven has been a steeper fall precisely because of the heights from which haut-bourgeois Ireland has fallen. For decades Durcan has mapped our Free State as it descended into Hell. No other poet was so well-prepared for this prolonged and bitter cartography. In our own lifetimes we lost not only a dominant system of faith but an elaborate context out of which we moulded our marriages, businesses and political loyalties.

Durcan in his poetry and commentary has interrogated all of these matters, pre-dating Dermot Morgan in his satirical humour, anticipating Eoghan Harris in his ecumenical politics, presaging Nuala O’Faolain or Nell McCafferty in his companionable praise of strong women. He is pre-eminently the poet of the strong woman, whether it’s the Limerick PhD candidate in ‘Petit Déjeuner with Breda,’ the Bosnian beggar in ‘Mother and Child, Merrion Square West’ or the artist in ‘Stage Four:’

‘There was a kind of nobleness about Helen Barry Moloney,Of indomitable gaiety, of gritty integrity,An uncompromisable spirit, a rebel artist.’

From the beginning of his career he has been one of the country’s pre-eminent feminists. Each poet belongs to his or her own generation.

An identifiable generation accumulates around an artist the way mussels grow around an old rope immersed in seawater. Generations do follow and new readers are born, but the first readership clings to a writer like a family.

Durcan’s readership was that first generation of our post-1960s Catholic decline. In his work one can see the disintegration of an entire bourgeois Ireland: imaginatively, he was the first to grab Ireland as it fell from grace.

His poems accumulate on the seashore of our present atheistic world, glittering shards and deeply gouged jewels of educated sensibility.

If Ireland ever became lost to history the decades between 1968 and 2008 could be reconstructed from the narratives found in Paul Durcan’s reimagined world. That he speaks to an entire generation, like Auden or Thomas Kinsella, is beyond dispute.

People have awaited his books the way another readership awaited a new collection by Auden or Heaney. His work has a constantly prophetic feel to it: in truth, he consoles us:

‘By resorting to the ancient rite of lighting a fireIn a public place under a tree to placate the gods…’

This is the weight and worth of his praise. His elegies for friends, or friends of friends, are both shrewd and deeply moving. His visual alertness is a form of prayer, as in ‘Death of a Corkman,’ his lament for Junior Daly:

‘He was a cigarette cupped in his left handIn a force five gale on Grand Parade;He was a pair of eyes twinklingIn the crook of his elbow..’

The elegy is completed and resonated through the news of John Moriarty’s death that Durcan hears of by phone while attending Mr Daly’s funeral in the North Chapel. The news leads to a second elegy where Moriarty and Daly are placed together, both workers in the vineyard of friendship: ‘John Moriarty leaned his hands on a field spade; Junior Daly leaned his hands on a yard brush.’

Friendship, for Durcan, has always been the holiest form of praise. Whether attending a Paris jazz club with poet Michael Coady or bumping into actor David Kelly on Stephen’s Green, he recites a hymn of friendship. To cap it all, to catch the prayer of life within which we all live and move, he finds the best friend of all, a grand-child, Arthur Lev Drummond:

’In a heartless world, a newborn heart; 8lbs, 8ozs at my mother’s breast. Mother of Amiability, pray for him.’

Another journey is completed, a Free State renewed, in the imagined territory of a simply marvellous poet.

* Paul Durcan will give a reading at Cork City Library, Grand Parade, on Thursday next at 8 pm. Admission is free.