19-05-2025
Paul Durcan, Irish poet who examined the Troubles and gave intense public readings
Paul Durcan, who has died aged 80, was a prolific and popular poet whose work was often marked by a reaction against authority and intolerance, which he found both in his relationship with his father and in his native Ireland.
Although his poetry reveals a profound love of both, he could be unsparing of his targets, which he could attack with scathing satire as well as affection.
A poem from Daddy, Daddy (1990), a collection that won the Whitbread Poetry Award, has both at once, as Durcan recalls 'the battle' to persuade his father to buy him a copy of Joyce's Ulysses when he was a teenager. John Durcan, the senior circuit court judge of County Mayo, declared (in the poem 'Ulysses', at least): 'I'll not be party to subsidising that blackguard / Bringing works of blasphemy into this house.'
Other poems respond in a direct, personal way to acts of terror and to the intransigence of the church. Durcan found himself enthralled by a sermon in 1986, but recoiled when it ended with a plea to vote against divorce in the forthcoming referendum. His own marriage had recently broken down, which led him to reflect: 'I have come into this temple today to pray / And be healed by, and joined with, the Spirit of Life, / Not to be invaded by ideology.'
Of self-styled liberators, he was directly damning. One poem, 'In Memory of Those Murdered in the Dublin Massacre, May 1974,' endsy evoking 'An explosion of petals, of aeons, and the waitresses too, flying breasts and limbs, / For a free Ireland.' He commemorated the victims of the 1998 Omagh bombing by reciting their names, then their ages, then their home towns, and concluding with a line addressed to the killers, 'I cannot forgive you.' He would broadcast these words later, aiming them straight at Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein.
But it was his confessional tone as much as his declamatory commentary on the Troubles that made him public property. He could use the rhythms of poems to pace his pieces as if they were short stories, some of which are outlandish fantasies, but others intimate, real and vivid.
His work appeared in rapid bursts – rather than emotion recollected in tranquillity, they can seem like notes on unfolding situations – and what his collections may at times lack in editing and polish, they gain in immediacy. In this he owed perhaps as much to Allen Ginsberg's hectoring use of repetition as he did to the refrains of Irish poems and melodies. It made his readings, during which he could appear to be meditating or delving into memory, especially intense.
Paul Durcan was born in Dublin on October 16 1944, the son of Justice John Durcan and his wife Sheila. Through his mother he was descended both from Maud Gonne, the muse of WB Yeats, and from John MacBride, who was executed for his part in the Easter Rising of 1916. Although Durcan would remember his father as an engaging raconteur, he would also recall being beaten from the age of 10 if he came lower than third in exams.
He began to study Law and Economics at University College, Dublin, but this effort to please his father was outweighed by Durcan's growing interest in poetry. The rift between them reached a crisis point when Durcan was 19 and a doctor persuaded his father that he should be institutionalised.
The family achieved this by ambushing Durcan in a pub on Merrion Street: two relatives entered, and a third caught him as he tried to escape by the back door. Taken home, he was given the first of many injections, and then sent to Harley Street. For the next three years, he was in and out of mental hospitals. He endured 27 rounds of electroconvulsive therapy, and later considered himself lucky to have been spared a lobotomy.
In 1966, he settled in London, where he worked for the Gas Board. He met his future wife, Nessa O'Neill, at the wedding of the poet Patrick Kavanagh; the two poets had become friends after Kavanagh wrote an enthusiastic review of Durcan's first published work, Endsville (1967, co-written with Brian Lynch). Durcan remembered finding in Kavanagh a merry wit on which few others had commented.
Durcan and Nessa O'Neill married in 1968. They settled in Cork in 1970, with their two daughters; Durcan resumed his studies, and gained a first-class degree in Archaeology and Medieval History. Nessa became a teacher in a prison in Cork, and Paul contributed a column to the Cork Examiner. The marriage broke down in 1984.
He was soon in demand internationally as a performer; trips to Russia and Brazil were particularly fruitful, not least because he could assess Ireland's relative place in the world. In the shadow of a statue of Stalin, he comments, 'We Irish have had our bellyful of blat / And blarney, more than our share / Of the nomenklatura of Church and Party…'
His outrage at authoritarian figures led him to praise strong women, and not only his mother, wife and daughters. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Mary Robinson's campaign to become President of Ireland, and wrote poems praising her.
Unlike the poets of the North, who would often find slanted ways to convey truths about the Troubles, Durcan addressed them with an open-eyed horror. Even when the island was at peace, though, he found aspects of it to ridicule. Poems from the early years of this century skewer the chattering classes, or the financiers who were responsible for the yo-yoing of the country's economy. Later collections mock Dubliners who find it easier to jet to Nice rather than drive to the south coast, or imagine a WB Yeats shopping centre.
He would explain in interviews that his traumatic experiences with doctors earlier in life left him with melancholia and depression, and much of his poetry can be seen as an expression of this. But time tempered it: he came to express an awareness of how horrible his ideas could be.
His responses to the world remained intimately bound up with his own private world: just as his relationship with his father was rooted in an Ireland in which Durcan found oppression and hypocrisy, he could see how his relationship with his mother, in her last years of dementia, could suggest parallels with an increasingly strange and frightening background.
In one poem, he sits with her as they watch news of the planes attacking the World Trade Centre: the poem reproduces the psalms and nursery rhymes that feel like a response that is at once natural and unnatural.
For a while, he found paintings a useful stimulus: he produced a volume of poems through which he imagined his way into the paintings of the National Gallery in London, Give Me Your Hand. Previously, he had curated an exhibition of paintings in Dublin, but still found opportunities to mock his commissioners: he has a guard muse about those around him, 'They scamper off for their coleslaw. / Punters scoff a lot of coleslaw in the National Gallery of Ireland.'
He is survived by two daughters and a son.
Paul Durcan, born October 16 1944, died May 17 2025
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