Paul Durcan: ‘Poetry was a gift that he loved to give others'

Irish Times

19-05-2025

Kathleen MacMahon
I knew Paul a little, as a neighbour in Ringsend and a friend of my mother's and my aunt's. When my mother died, in 2010, he came up to me at the removal and thrust a piece of paper at me - a two-page portrait in verse that captured her perfectly, with 'her seaside airs and graces'. I asked him to read it at her funeral the next day, which he very graciously did. Then he stood in the road and blocked the path of the hearse, clutching at his hair with grief. Utterly poetic.
The poetry was a gift that he loved to give others. I remember when he was launching The Days of Surprise in 2015, there was an event at the Pavilion in Dún Laoghaire. I went to it with Maeve Binchy's widower Gordon Snell and her cousin, Sara Burke. We were having supper beforehand at a restaurant near the theatre, and Paul was at a table nearby with his publicist. He and Gordon didn't know each other well, but they reminisced about a St Patrick's Day parade they'd attended in Chicago with Maeve.
Gordon, ever the gentleman, wrote Paul a note that was delivered to the dressing room before the reading. We took our seats in the theatre and Paul came on stage and read a poem he'd just written for Gordon. I was struck not just by his speed in dashing off a poem, but by the elegance of the offering, like presenting someone with a flower. Even though he told me afterwards in an email that 'readings are fearful things that slice years off my life'.
This is the poem:
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for Gordon, and remembering Maeve,
and all those days
long years ago
on the shores of LSD
in white stretch limos
laughing ourselves into kingdom come
love
Paul
He inhabited the role of poet so completely. The poetry was not just in his work but in his demeanour, his everyday interactions. Bumping into him in the grocery aisle in Tesco in Ringsend, he would launch straight into a conversation that might have been a poem and perhaps soon would be. 'Do you think Bill Clinton is a PHONEY? I think he's a PHONEY.' Even his e-mails were broken into stanzas and capitalised, with an aside to note the words he loved, like Scandinavia. Everything he did and said came out as poetry. He was the real thing!
Conor O'Callaghan
I first met Paul Durcan in the summer of 1984. He was sharing a room with our father in the Rutland Centre in Templeogue. I knew his work from his appearances on the Mike Murphy show on the radio and was in awe of him. He came and stayed in our house in Dundalk shortly after.
I was writing poems by then. Paul read them and was always so kind and supportive. 'Read Louis MacNeice,' he told me, 'and the new Mahon Selected from OUP, and Elizabeth Bishop.' My copies of those poets' books date from the end of that summer.
We stayed very close for 20 years. We sat in his cave in Ringsend and talked poetry and art and Bob Dylan. I loved how, for someone as brilliant as he undoubtedly was, he had this childlike relationship to the given world. It was ever a source of absolute wonderment and/or bemusement.
When, in 2013, I published a book of poems with a big long mad sequence at the end, I asked Paul's permission to dedicate it to him. Why? he asked. Because I loved him and his work, I said, and I wanted to salute him as a master, the Jacques Prevert of Dartmouth Square. He liked that last bit.
His eyes crinkled and he gave that gap-toothed, down-curled smile of his. 'The Jacques Prevert of Dartmouth Square,' he repeated in that slow, deep voice of his. 'Golly!'
The popularity of his work should never be allowed to cast a shadow over its quality, which is brilliant and which nobody will get rid of too easily. His inaugural reading as writer-in-residence in Trinity College remains the best poetry reading I was ever at. It was electric, like the storming of the Bastille. After his first poem, The Haulier's Wife Meets Jesus on the Road Near Moone, there was a moment's silence. Then we all just cheered and cheered….
Bernard MacLaverty
I was saddened to hear of the death of the writer and poet, Paul Duncan. I had known and admired his work, in prose and verse, for many years. He had a totally individual voice which was instantly recognisable on the page with its feelings of concern, its wit, its humanity and its total honesty.
One of the things that made him unforgettable was to hear him read or recite his work live. He would take the stage (even if it was an early morning) and command the audience with his eyes. He would wait for silence. When the room was utterly still he would begin - spellbinding each and every one of us with a mixture of solemnity and wit, humour and disquiet - reeling us in, telling us his truth. His work and his sound, for those of us who heard him, will never be forgotten.
William Wall
Paul has been a legend now for so long that it's difficult to find anything new to say about him. But I remember him well from his years in Cork, and in fact I remember the first time I heard him read. His reading style was electrifying, his writing was daring, different, shocking at times, but also amusing and engaging.
Even though he was second fiddle to someone else that evening I can only remember his contribution. I remember his amazing ability, as Kavanagh put it, to 'Set an old phrase burning', his ability to satirise the norms of a petty bourgeois State and its icons, to set certain habits and values in crystal and then smash them.
My favourite memory is the first time I heard him read Making Love Outside Áras an Uachtaráin. He will be sadly missed, not just by Neasa and his family, but by those people who were privileged to hear him either in person or on RTÉ. Sit ei terra levis.
Aifric McGlinchey
I was moved to tears when I heard at the Cork International Poetry Festival that we've lost Paul Durcan. In a room full of poets, we held a two-minute silence for him. And then Mary O'Malley read Googletown, which she dedicated to him.
No other poet in Ireland has seemed to me more in keeping with the mystical wavelengths of connection than Paul Durcan. At the microphone, his range of tones and his presence commanded absolute attention. To hear him read was to be imbued with the sense of a transcendent light shining on each person, object or scene described. The listener would be embodied by a spirit of joy or outrage or empathy, swept up in the ebullience of his quirky originality.
Durcan's poetry has that bewitching quality of effortlessness, along with wit and mercurial melancholy. If playfulness and intimacy are defining features in his work, he also proved to be the most versatile of poets: one moment, concrete, visually kinetic, the next, shape-shifting to combine topicality in ways no other poet can quite emulate.
Quirky, fey, or a wrecking ball for social justice, his poems have a quality unique to him. Whether as seer or participant, young boy or a woman aged 81 'and new as a snowdrop', the speaker of his poems invites the reader to dive into a landscape or cityscape populated with people, birds, animals, fish, feeling and ideas, and experience that sense of recognition.
I first met Paul at the 40th Hennessy awards. He was the judge of the Emerging Poetry competition and had chosen me as the winner. On the strength of that award, I think, my publisher offered to publish my debut collection. So, Paul Durcan was instrumental in beginning my life as a published poet. He also gave me a lovely endorsement for that debut.
I met him again at the Ennis Book Festival, where I was invited to introduce him. He was warm, attentive, made proper eye contact. The kind of person that made you feel seen and heard. What an unusual and memorable individual.
We have lost one of Ireland's most iconic poets. But we are lucky to have the legacy of his work. Affectionate, satirical, insightful, the immediacy of his cumulative observations brings us to this understanding: here we all are. The small rooms of his poems add up to a mansion of lived life.
The totality of his work could be seen as a colloquial, cultural and psychological archive of what it means to be living in Ireland, in the world, at this moment in the continuum of history. Durcan never forgot the web of connection between self and world, between what we do in our solitude and in our most public interactions. Any time I need uplifting, I read his poems, and come away appreciating more fully our core human desire to connect, and to celebrate, even in dark times, this miraculous life.
Enda Wyley
I first met Paul Durcan in 1990. I was in my early twenties and took part in his poetry workshops in Trinity College, Dublin where he was Writer Fellow that year.
Mostly, Paul told us stories about poets he knew, particularly Michael Hartnett, whom he revered. How could I ever forget the one of himself and Hartnett presenting themselves at the headquarters of Securicor in 1960s London only to both be hired – two young Irish poets in uniforms and peaked hats being dispatched to guard a financial institution and an air transport terminal in London. A tale worthy of a Paul Durcan poem, for sure.
'This head is a poet's head/ this head holds a galaxy,' Michael Hartnett once wrote, and I have always been convinced that Paul Durcan's head also held just that – a marvellous galaxy that lit up our poetry firmament. Today that light has gone out with the devastating news that Paul Durcan, the greatest of poets, has died. May he rest in peace.
Martin Doyle
I interviewed Paul Durcan in 1993 in London for The Irish Post to mark the publication by Harvill of A Snail in My Prime, his new and selected poems. I was struck by his mild demeanour, given the provocative titles of some of his works, such as Archbishop of Kerry to Have Abortion.
He had an unrivalled reputation as a reader of his work, who, his fellow poet Derek Mahon wrote, 'with a microphone for a lute, can, like Orpheus, charm the birds from the trees'.
'The saying of poetry is what poetry is,' he told me. 'So I don't think of the tweo things as separate, they go together, it;s a form odf music. Every time you read, you never know if the house of cards is going to collapse or whether you'll get over Becher's Brook. Perhaps that's a better way of looking at it. These riders have ridden over the course God knows how many times but they never know if this is going to be the day.'
As a kind of postscript to our interview, Durcan spoke of having spent several years after leaving school in London and how England had been good to him, which made the IRA's bombing campaign in Britain that much harder to accept.
'Like many Irish people, I feel helplessly angry with what the IRA do because London was a home to me when I had nowhere else to go. It gave me work, work which I wouldn't have got back in Ireland. I worked in the London Planetarium where my official job title was Stellar Manipulator. I was the guy who flung the stars up on the ceiling and here I was married and here my children were born. This country has been home to thousands and thousands of Irish people.'
He feared that we would not learn the lessons of our troubled past.
'There's a poem in this book, In Memory of Those Murdered in the Dublin Massacre, May 1974. And I noticed when I read the poem here or back in Ireland people don't remember, they've forgotten.'
Paul Durcan and his poetry will, however, be long remembered.