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New York Times
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Paul Durcan, Irish Poet of Tortured and Tender Souls, Is Dead at 80
Paul Durcan, an Irish poet whose droll, sardonic and frequently tender poems about lads in dimly lit pubs, quotidian life in the countryside and the trauma of political violence made him one of Ireland's most popular writers of the 20th century, died on May 17 in Dublin. He was 80. His death, in a nursing home, was caused by age-related myocardial degeneration, his daughter Sarah Durcan said. In the annals of long-suffering poets, Mr. Durcan's hardships probably merit special distinction. After he set about becoming a writer in the 1960s, his father — a hidebound judge who called him a 'sissy' — apparently sent family members to remove him from a Dublin pub and then had him committed to a psychiatric hospital. Mr. Durcan suffered through several years of electroshock treatments. He feared he would be lobotomized. 'I was seen as going the way of a poet,' he once said, 'and that had to be stopped.' After running away the hospital, Mr. Durcan sought out fellow poets for assistance and mentorship, including Patrick Kavanagh, who helped him publish his work. Mr. Durcan channeled the trauma of his father's emotional abandonment and the horrors of psychiatric wards into an unmistakable voice on the page. 'Durcan's abundant imagination has indeed left us a universe of iconoclastic poems that combine art and everyday life, insight and originality,' the poet Gerard Smyth wrote in The Irish Times after Mr. Durcan's death. 'He was one of the great mavericks, a literary phenomenon with a commitment to poetry as a calling.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Paul Durcan obituary
Running through the work of the poet Paul Durcan, who has died aged 80, was a strong ironic engagement with contemporary Irish mores and manners, and much else besides. With his first full-length collection, O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor (1975), Durcan showed himself to be a poet of many gifts, and a complete original. He resembled no one else. His poetry is oblique, exhilarating, unsettling and diverting all at once, and never hesitated to take off into a realm of the surreal. The 22 collections that followed Westport between 1978 and 2016 are a testimony to the poet's inventive powers and his distinctive style, and established him among his contemporaries as a force for enlightenment, an artful riddler and rhymer, or the joker in the pack. Among the outstanding collections are Sam's Cross (1978), Going Home to Russia (1987) and A Snail in My Prime (1993); but certain key poems scattered throughout his body of work continue to make an impact. Six Nuns Die in Convent Inferno, for example, The Beckett at the Gate, Going Home to Russia, and Making Love Outside Áras an Uachtaráin (which cocks a snook at De Valera's Ireland with its pieties and prohibitions). Some are filled with erotic affirmation (Teresa's Bar), or are geared to repudiate misogyny, cruelty, bigotry and so on. The Troubles get a showing, with poems such as the beautiful and mysterious Riding School illuminating the conflict. And some of his poems are simply caustically hilarious: What Shall I Wear, Darling, to the Great Hunger? Incidentally, at one point he pokes amiable fun at the poetry reading (tedious, boring) – but his own readings brought him additional acclaim, with audiences mesmerised by the hypnotic timbre of his voice. The route by which anyone becomes a poet is a mystery, and with Durcan it is even more so. His talent was seemingly not inherited from any of his relatives, and before it burst into full bloom, the young Paul had a number of traumas to overcome, despite – or perhaps because of – being born into a Dublin family of legal high-flyers. His father, John Durcan, was a barrister and circuit court judge. His mother, Sheila (nee MacBride), had practised as a solicitor before marriage. Both his younger siblings became solicitors in due course, and it was expected that Paul would do likewise. He was educated at a Jesuit school, Gonzaga college, in the Dublin suburb of Ranelagh, and went on to University College Dublin to study, among other things, theology. But he never completed his degree. One of Durcan's characteristic practices is to start a poem by concocting an imaginary newspaper headline, or parodying an actual one, such as Cardinal Dies of Heart Attack in Dublin Brothel, for instance. By a singular irony, a comparable headline in the Irish Independent in 2007 alluded to an actual incident in Durcan's own past. Kidnapped by his Family and Put in a Mental Home, it read, referring to a time when things had turned dark for the 19-year-old student. Largely at the instigation of his father, Paul was forcibly removed to a psychiatric hospital in south Dublin, where he received a diagnosis of clinical depression. Worse was to follow: transferred to an asylum near Epsom, in Surrey, he underwent 27 crippling rounds of electroconvulsive therapy. (Durcan always maintained that whatever mental health problems he encountered throughout his life were created, not alleviated, by this awful treatment.) After it was over he returned to Dublin, chastened but not annihilated. He began to enjoy the company of fellow poets, including Michael Hartnett, Anthony Cronin and Derek Mahon, and became something of a protege of the normally aloof Patrick Kavanagh, in whose company at a wedding reception he met Nessa O'Neill. They married in 1969, and she remained an inspiration, a friend and an object of adulation for the rest of his life – even after the pair separated in 1984. They lived for a while in London, where Durcan worked for the gas board, and spent time studying paintings in the Tate gallery (painting was a lasting obsession – in 1991 he brought out a collection of poems about paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland, Crazy About Women). There was also an interlude in Barcelona, and a longer sojourn in Cork, from 1970, where Durcan took a degree in archaeology and medieval history at the university, and wrote a column for the Cork Examiner, while Nessa taught in a prison. But poetry, and life in Dublin, remained his principal resources. From the mid-1970s on, both his literary reputation and his idiosyncratic modus operandi were building up. He wrote extensively about his complicated relationship with his father. In the poem The Company of the White Drinking Cauldrons, from his collection Daddy, Daddy (which won the Whitbread award in 1990), Durcan wrote: I was the only creature in the world Daddy trusted,Which is why in later years he conspired to murder me. From a couple of poems, Going Home to Mayo, Winter 1949, and Crinkle, Near Birr, you get the essence of the story – one minute idyllic, in the former: … And in the eveningsI walked with my father in the high grass down by the river … And then a sour note entering in the latter, with the father calling his son a sissy and urging him to be a man. Then the beatings start – but in the end, a kind of reconciliation is effected. 'Estranged as we were,' he recalled in Hymn to My Father (1987), 'I am glad that it was in this life, / That I loved you.' It is significant that Mayo is the place where father and son are most vividly in accord in his work. Both of Durcan's parents were Mayo-born, and he remembers his paternal grandmother's house, 'all oil-lamps and women, / And my bedroom over the public bar below'. His mother was a niece of Maj John MacBride, who married Maud Gonne and was executed by the British in 1916 for his part in the Easter Rising. Durcan acknowledged his ancestral ties, but resisted the lure of ultra-nationalism. Parodying the 1916 visionaries' prescription for the country – 'Not only free but Gaelic as well, / Not only Gaelic but free as well' – in the two-line poem At the Grave of O'Donovan Rossa (1989), he states: Not Irish merely but English as well;Not English merely but Irish as well. Durcan was the recipient of many honours and accolades, including a lifetime achievement award at the 2014 Irish book awards. He was elected a member of the Irish artists association Aosdána, and was Ireland professor of poetry from 2004 to 2007. A selection of his poems, edited by Edna Longley, was published in 1982, and in 1996 Colm Tóibín edited a collection of essays on the Durcan oeuvre, called The Kilfenora Teaboy. In his last years, Durcan suffered from ill health, but he never relinquished his spirit or his formidable wit. Like his mother, Sheila – as he reported in 2003 in his prose collection Paul Durcan's Diary – he 'always had the keenest sense of the black joke of life'. He is survived by his daughters with Nessa, Sarah and Síabhra, by his son, Michael, from another relationship, and by nine grandchildren. Paul Durcan, poet, born 16 October 1944; died 17 May 2025
Irish Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Bridge of Sighs (and Laughter)
Walking to Ringsend for Paul Durcan's funeral on Thursday, I noticed a crowd of locals gathered on the city side of the humpbacked bridge that crosses the Dodder just before the village. They were waiting for the cortege, a man told me, to continue an old tradition whereby – even if they don't know the deceased - Ringsenders help the bereaved family carry the remains over the river to the church. As I took up a position on the far side to get a picture, a woman emerged from somewhere in funeral finery (and a bright red hat). 'Are they going to carry Paul over the bridge?' she asked. They are, I told her, pointing to where the hearse that had just arrived. 'Oh gosh,' he said, hurrying off to join in. READ MORE Sure enough, from there to St Patrick's Church, the cortege became a local production, as the undertakers stood aside temporarily, and the villagers took over as pall bearers and funeral directors. Not all those involved were dressed for the occasion. One leading participant had a baseball hat and shorts. But, the informality of the attire somehow only added to the poignancy. The idea of crossing rivers to eternity is a staple of mythology. In James Joyce's Ulysses, where Paddy Dignam made the journey in the opposite direction to Durcan, the four rivers of Hades become the Dodder, the Grand Canal, the Liffey, and the Royal Canal, in that order. But when I asked Father Ivan Tonge of St Patrick's about it afterwards, he thought the Ringsend tradition might have its origins in a more practical consideration. The Dodder is notoriously prone to flooding on its last stretches and must have washed many early bridges away: 'Locals would sometimes have had to help carry coffins across.' The custom may also, however, be tied up with the unusual traditions of dockers, a profession to which Ringsend has long been central. It used to be the case – and maybe it still happens sometimes – that a docker's coffin was carried by a circuitous route involving the homes of all his friends, at each of which the door knocker would be lifted and dropped one last time, to say goodbye. More mysteriously (according to a 1953 report in The Irish Press), dockers' coffins were also carried 'between the two gasometers': industrial landmarks of the area. Whatever the bridge-carrying ceremony's origins, like many old habits, it might have ended in 2020 with the pandemic. Instead, that only increased the determination of Ringsenders like David 'Smasher' Kemple to keep it alive. 'The Covid ruined a lot of things, and we didn't want it to ruin everything .' he said in a short recent film for the Irish Hospice Foundation. He soon found himself performing the rite for an old friend, whose death first alerted him to the threat of Covid: 'He was a fit man going down to Galway that Friday,' recalled Kemple, sadly. 'Then a couple of weeks later, we were carrying Larry over the bridge.' Mind you, Ringsenders tend to have a robust sense of humour, and 'Smasher' is no exception. He also jokes in the film that he'd like to hold his own wake before he dies, 'to see what it's like'. In which vein, it struck me on Thursday that it was a pity Durcan – one of the funnier poets Ireland has ever produced - wasn't alive to enjoy his own funeral. Among the poems read during the service was one inspired by the election of the pope in 2013, in which he compares Ringsend to the back streets of Buenos Aires and describes many of the landmarks of the funeral route as if they were stations of the cross: 'The Barber Shop, Tesco Express, HQ Dry Cleaners, the three public houses – The Yacht, The Oarsman, Sally's Return – The Bridge Café, the pharmacy, Ladbrokes bookmakers.' He would surely have got another poem from his last trip into the village. The pallbearers do special requests on occasion. In an interview with the Dublin Inquirer newspaper in 2020, another regular participant Eoin Dunne recalled the funeral of a man who had spent his life working as a match-day steward in nearby Lansdowne Road, a stadium visible from the bridge. On his final journey, as demanded, the coffin carriers did an about turn and bowed the departed in gratitude to the scene of so many pay days. But comedy always vies with solemnity in the Ringsend tradition. Dunne also told the Inquirer about an occasion when the deceased was (a) a former scrap metal dealer and (b) very heavy. As the carriers struggled under the coffin, Dunne recalled: 'One of the lads was saying, 'I think he has all the bleeding copper in it'.' Then there was the time they overdid their enthusiasm for the tradition, stopping a hearse with three limousines behind it at the bottom of the bridge. They immediately launched into the routine of organising each other to carry the coffin into Ringsend, until the driver of the hearse intervened. 'Lads, lads stop,' he said (allegedly): 'This funeral is going to f**king Bray.'
Irish Examiner
23-05-2025
- Sport
- Irish Examiner
Paul Rouse: Durcan's work on sport pure poetry in motion
Paul Durcan wrote some great poems about sport. He died last weekend, aged 80, but his work will live on. In a recent tribute to him on the 'Arena' show on RTÉ Radio One, the presenter Sean Rocks described him as the 'most companionable of poets'. It was a great way to put it. This is exclusive subscriber content. Already a subscriber? Sign in Subscribe to access all of the Irish Examiner. Annual €120€60 Best value Monthly €10€4 / month Unlimited access. Subscriber content. Daily ePaper. Additional benefits.
Irish Times
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Paul Durcan remembered as ‘Ireland's poet' at funeral service in Ringsend
Continuing a decades-old funeral tradition in Ringsend, the remains of poet Paul Durcan were carried across the river Dodder by locals and family members on the way to his requiem Mass at St Patrick's church on Thursday. The motor cortege paused before the humpbacked bridge, where residents of the village greeted the Durcan family and then helped carry the coffin the rest of the journey, in tribute to a man who had lived among them for the past 30 years. President Michael D Higgins was among the mourners who filled the church for the funeral, the music at which included a recording of Durcan's typically spirited poetry reading on his 1990 duet with Van Morrison: In the Days Before Rock 'n' Roll. Chief funeral celebrant Father Ivan Tonge cited the 12th century Book of Leinster, recently restored and now the subject of an exhibition in Trinity College Dublin, as evidence of the respect Ireland has always had for its poets, even 'at the highest levels of society'. READ MORE Durcan's funeral continued that ancient tradition, Fr Tonge said. He was Ireland's poet, but he was also Ringsend's and a regular visitor to the church, as witnessed in the community's moving tribute earlier. Actor Mark O'Regan read Durcan's poem The Days of Surprise, which is set in St Patrick's on the day after the election of Pope Francis in 2013, and features a lovingly detailed description of the village, including the bridge: The library with its Chinese granite benches, The health centre, the Master Butcher's, Ferrari's Takeaway, Spar, The charity shop, the wine shop, the humpbacked bridge, Under which, behind Ringsend Church, the River Dodder flows, Like a little mare over the last fence At Cheltenham or Punchestown Before it breasts the line at the winning post, Its rider bent over double Like the angel at the Annunciation, And meets the River Liffey and the sea Durcan's daughter, Sarah, delivered a eulogy in which she said that managing to make a living out of poetry was probably her father's greatest achievement. But she recalled that he also had a great love of sport and liked to believe, had it not been for an early injury, he could have been a star football player. The poet's remains are brought to St Patrick's Church, Ringsend, Dublin. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw He had also been pleasantly surprised by the number of grandchildren he eventually acquired and 'struggled valiantly to keep up with them'. Durcan especially enjoyed it when his poetry connected with young people, she said. She recalled his special delight in the story of a Cork student some years ago who, of the prescribed poets on the curriculum, had studied only her father and promised that if the gamble paid off, he would get the name Paul Durcan 'tattooed on his backside'. Sure enough, Durcan did come up that year and, as widely shared on social media, the student got the tattoo. As part of a reflection on her father's life, Siabhra Durcan read an extract from Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. A close friend of the poet, Caitríona Crowe, read A Psalm of David. Michael John O'Neill read from St Paul's Letter to the Corinthians. Soloist Kathy Kelly sang Ag Críost an Síol. Violinist David O'Doherty played the traditional air, The Coolin/An Chúilfhionn. President Michael D Higgins attended the funeral service for Paul Durcan in Ringsend. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw Writers at the funeral included Rita Ann Higgins, Dermot Bolger, Mary Leland, Belinda McKeon, and Gerard Smith. The Patrick Kavanagh Centre in Inniskeen, whose annual poetry award helped launch Durcan's career, was represented by Una and Art Agnew. [ Paul Durcan - 11 memorable lines: 'She was a whirlpool, And I very nearly drowned' Opens in new window ] Also in attendance were Arts Council director Maureen Kennelly, former TDs John Gormley and Conor Lenihan, journalists Mick Heaney and Paul Gillespie, broadcaster John Kelly, and the historian Charles Lysaght. The poet's remains were greeted at the church by Ballina uilleann piper Eamonn Walsh, and later carried out to the strains of Bob Dylan's Paths of Victory. Durcan's deep connections with Mayo will be remembered at funeral prayers in St Mary's Church, Westport, on Friday, after which he will be buried at the nearby Aughavale Cemetery.
