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Irish Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
New poetry: Frank McGuinness, Erica McAlpine, James Harpur and Dane Holt
'Did he know he trespassed where none should pry?' Frank McGuinness writes in Flight, 1909. In context, he's discussing 'the first flight over Lisfannon', taken by his father's father, but the poem also gestures to some of his latest collection's concerns, and obsessions. Many of the poems in The River Crana (Gallery Press, €12.95/€19.50) move towards and away from revelation and confession – they paint scenes that offer self-exposure and dwell among the risks involved in finally taking the plunge. Touch, 1976 is a sequence of poems pivoting around a brief encounter with 'the kind of guy you should not trust in bars' and its aftermath, from several perspectives (including the bed itself, in the slightly odder poem of the set). McGuinness's eye for portraiture, carnality and psychology all come to the fore in the telling, and his shifts of perspective allow for a bruised kind of empathy, 'never again looking/the length of his life and out of my own'. Elsewhere we hear about 'saviours who have lost the plot' and others 'full of remorse/and craving compassion'. It's a various book, elegiac, playful and intertextual; McGuinness is fond of and adept at the dramatic monologue form, bringing in a whole chorus of unexpected voices, ably thrown, from the ancient world, Shakespeare and Maeve Binchy at Croagh Patrick. READ MORE His eye for the telling image, too, shines out, from Armenian orchards that 'smell of pomegranates/the colour of veal' to lambs 'licking us sticky clean as honeycomb'. One of the sharpest poems, Lack of Sleep, also shows off his skill in form, and reaches for a kind of universalist timelessness – a note he also strikes in a touching version of Cavafy , Bandage, which is similarly rich in a sense of being vulnerably observant in the midst of all the action: 'I liked looking,/looking at the blood/that belonged to him'. Traditional form is the keystone for Erica McAlpine, and in Small Pointed Things (Carcanet, £11.99) she brings her scrupulous musicality to bear on the natural world, retellings of Ovid and 'the point of no return'. She's particularly good at turning scenes from nature and the quotidian into something at times almost parable-like, ruminative while never abandoning the physical or concrete realm. In Bats and Swallows, the book's opening poem, the speaker addresses someone whose nature it is 'always to side one way/or the other' while she prefers an approach where 'either, or both, hold sway'. This having it both ways instinct serves her well here, allowing her to at once debunk the idea of ideas , 'They can be elliptical/in the worst way,/or too convoluted even to say' while taking them for a walk, in carefully chiselled stanzas; to see poetry as 'a dazzle/of pure thought/about itself' while simultaneously clinging to its gravity, and craftiness. [ Paul Durcan: 'Poetry was a gift that he loved to give others' Opens in new window ] There's something of Marianne Moore to her animal poems, another poet who, like McAlpine, 'cares for delicacy of stroke', especially in her muscular, rebarbative scorpion who is 'a prizefighting champion/posing and preposterous/and plated like a tiny rhinoceros'. Throughout, in her many studies of the natural world, she aims for something more than simple taxonomy, or voyeurism: 'But life gives//itself over/purely to whatever/is near it', she writes in Kingfishers, and that sort of companionable generosity spotlights the book as a whole, whether finding fellow feeling for The Second Warthogs 'not-quite-worthy/of being seen' or the labour of the spider and its web, 'this feeling/like combing through a baby's hair'. These are poems which, however well built and apparently ordered, know that 'some things can't be straightened out' and, for all their enviable sprezzatura, legislate for the dark undertone beneath the music and 'felt the sting/of knowing we draw/from our own grave/to water what we have'. James Harpur, whose new collection is The Magic Theatre. Photograph: Alan Betson James Harpur's new collection The Magic Theatre (Two Rivers Press, £12) is steeped – at times stewed – in nostalgia for his days as an undergraduate at Cambridge University, a 'power station that burns on brains'. There's something charmingly guileless, a quality that lends it a slightly Rupert Brooke-ish idealism and helps to disarm the cynical reader who fears the experience of reading it will be akin to gatecrashing someone else's college reunion. The Brooke scent is strongest in moments of reverie, such as Summer Term – 'Begins mid spring: days of moon-white suns/The punts still smoky in their pens/And trees along the Backs pubescent green.//At first, insouciance of students, phoney war'. It isn't all blissful punting and sepia-tinged lost content, however, and the most moving – and compelling – strain of the collection is found in the relationship revealed between father and son, played out subtly and in small gestures. The divide brought about between the son's growing erudition and learning threatens to cause a schism, 'These are perhaps the final moments/Our worlds will still connect/Before I get more bookish by the month/And make him feel inadequate' but later revelations, of tenderness and more complicated elements, add depth – 'he'll let on/From the cosmos of his wheelchair/That he could only pay my fees/By gambling. Roulette in Kensington'. Friendships and relationships are formed and lost, and the world of acting entered into – the whole thing at times a meditation on performance, on and offstage, and the 'tinnitus of humiliation' which sometimes accompanies it. Self-sabotage and a perennial tendency towards running counter to his own interest's seems to stymie the narrator at several crucial moments, and aside from the odd Pooterish moment it's hard not to be won over by a poet capable of resurrecting his school days in such vivid colour, 'A gold balloon arcing from the river/Through a mist of atomised champagne'. Dane Holt's debut Father's Father's Father (Carcanet, £11.99) is full of tall tales, an often surrealist narrative instinct and a tendency to turn on a sixpence, or pull various rugs out, just as the reader starts to get comfortable. This can – at times – risk settling into a groove of sorts itself, one starts to wait for the twist or the volte-face, but throughout there's a clarity and precision to the language, and a fine knack for image and phrasemaking, which largely wins out. It's not an accident that the first line of the first poem, John Cena, about the professional wrestler, is 'Everything you do you do precisely'. Ironically, that narrator's exhortations might, in the end, be usefully applied to some of the poems here – 'f**k up once in a while, why don't you,/in a way we don't anticipate'. The best work here is that which is willing to walk the tightrope over sentiment, such as an unexpectedly moving poem riffing on the narrator's grandmother by utilising Tammy Wynette: 'how saying one thing so/exactly to someone intent on hearing//the opposite is art' or another family-related one, Humphrey Bogart, about a grandfather and his son, 'They both loved/the men Humphrey Bogart played'. There's something analogous about this idea of performing, or wearing masks, and Holt makes hay with the subject in a series of poems which use wrestling – that ultimate mix of pantomime and physicality – as their means of talking about being 'unmoored/from dramatic structure', a plight many of the masks and characters come to share. Avoidance, and variations on the theme, are at the heart of Father's Father's Father, and while the urge towards following WS Merwin's advice 'I could do anything' occasionally results in some slightly arbitrary-seeming, simile-heavy wackiness, often it leads to something original, well-seen and entertaining.
Irish Times
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Paul Durcan: ‘Poetry was a gift that he loved to give others'
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: READ MORE 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.
Irish Times
07-05-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Róisín Ingle: I did a good bit of ‘maevesdropping' in the shop. It's what Binchy would have wanted
My friend sent me the photo on a Saturday morning. It was a photograph of a book in the window of an Oxfam charity shop in Dublin. Not just any book, it was My First Book by the late and marvellous Maeve Binchy. My friend had never seen it before but I knew the book well. It's a collection of her writing in The Irish Times first published in 1970. In my house, it's a sacred tome. I got my copy years ago at a second-hand book stall at a market in Howth. I keep it on the locker by my bed, like a taliswoman. It's full of Maeve's ordinary, extraordinary stories. They involve human happenings she picked up on while eavesdropping – I like to call it maevesdropping – her way around Dublin , London and other parts of the world. On the back of the book it says that Maeve – who once edited The Irish Times women's page and also served as travel editor – 'has for eight years been writing the type of column to which people respond 'that's what I've always felt but never said''. READ MORE I've flicked through My First Book so much over the years – seeking and always finding inspiration on weeks when the words won't come – that it's now falling apart. That is no shade on The Irish Times, which printed the collection, but it wasn't that sturdily bound. The copy of My First Book in the window of the Rathmines charity shop looked, from the photograph, to be in excellent condition. My friend thought it was there as part of a display, the way sometimes charity shops curate certain items which can only be purchased from a certain date in the near future. I called the shop to check. The book was for sale right now. Clearly, somebody who worked there had given it a starring role in the shop window knowing the likes of me and my friend would be drawn to it like moths to a penny candle. 'Can you keep it for me?' I asked. 'We can't hold anything for anybody,' the man said, which was fair enough. My First Book is a collection of articles Maeve Binchy wrote for The Irish Times It was Saturday and I wasn't dressed yet – preferring, as a general rule, to leave getting dressed to as late as possible on a Saturday morning. A friend was due to arrive for coffee, but I asked her if we could do that on Sunday instead. I got dressed quickly and asked my husband for a lift to Rathmines. ( It's been nearly a year but I'm still not used to saying the word husband ). 'For a mission,' I said enigmatically. He was reluctant until he found out the mission involved a charity shop. [ Rereading Maeve Binchy — as loved and relevant as ever Opens in new window ] [ I'm enjoying my new friendship. We're at the stage when everything is fascinating Opens in new window ] He needed some new jumpers and he loves a bit of rummaging through the items on display. Our friend, who has a pathological aversion to charity shops, describes the clothes they sell as 'dead men's clothes'. My husband dropped me off at the charity shop and went to park the car. I hardly dared look in the window in case the book was gone. I imagined some other Binchy fan strolling around Rathmines just minutes earlier, glancing at the book, immediately realising how precious it was and striding purposefully in to claim their prize. But there it was. My First Book. Sitting beside other old books about Irish history and politics. It was mine for €7. It's mine now but it wasn't always. According to the inscription, it was a Christmas present for two people in 1976. It reads: 'For Marie, Paddy, Love Mary Lou.' I hope Marie and Paddy enjoyed it as much as I always will. There are so many wonderful bits of the book I could quote, but one I'd forgotten was the time Maeve wrote about sending Thin Lizzy a fan letter when Whiskey in the Jar came out. She told them it was the best record she'd heard in years. 'I thought they were poor and struggling and thin,' she wrote. 'I thought they must be needing a few brisk fan letters from older women.' It really was the best morning, popping in and out of charity shops After that she got invited to lunch with Thin Lizzy. Well, her and a room full of journalists in The Shelbourne Hotel. 'None of them looked poor … Phil was ... thin all right, the others were kind of average-sized,' she observed. Maeve asked Phil Lynott, hopefully, whether their new record was another Irish traditional song 'all souped up'. 'No man,' said Phil. 'No man. It's bad to get stuck into a groove if you know what I mean, bad to get typecast.' Maeve wrote that she replied 'Yes man', adding that she wondered: 'Should I throw up my job immediately, was I stuck in a groove?' With my book in a bag, the rest of the morning was spent picking out clothes with my husband. It really was the best morning, popping in and out of charity shops alongside people who know there are too many clothes in the world already and who love a bargain and who can't afford to shop for new things. They don't mind wearing dead men's clothes. I did a good bit of maevesdropping, too, while I was there. It's what she would have wanted.
