Colm Tóibín on poet Paul Durcan turning 80: ‘Beside the wildness, there is tenderness’

Paul Durcan’s voice as he read from his work and spoke about poetry could be both deadpan and dead serious; it could also be wildly comic and brilliantly indignant.
I loved the undercurrent of anarchy playing against moral seriousness and I began to go to his readings. These were extraordinary performances where many parts were acted out, and where the comedy was undermined by anger sometimes, or pure melancholy, or raw quirkiness, or a sympathy for pain or loss or loneliness.
And, slowly, I began to appreciate the artistry in his poems, the craft, the command.
His poems are open forms filled by voices, often the voice of the poet himself or someone like him, or the voice of a persona he has created or a character he has made. Some of the narrative is shot through with surprise or delight or wonder at the strangeness of the world or the sheer sadness of things. At the centre of Durcan’s poetic enterprise is an urge to destabilise and make us re-see what is odd and what is ordinary.
These are both poems of passionate statement and poems that eschew earnestness or easy feeling. While they play in the space between the real and the surreal, they blur these categories. The poet emerges, as though from a lair or a cave, to check out the world, armed with a glittering mind and a moral sense lightened by a delight in misrule, comic timing and tonal grace.
Just as James Joyce in Ulysses loved what was playful and parodic, relishing lists and shifts in style, Durcan’s imagination is ready for surprise, for an unexpected moment of pure pathos followed by a line or an image that is peculiar or sharply funny. In Ulysses, Joyce placed Leopold Bloom’s rich consciousness and unusual ways of noticing against a sensibility that was vulnerable. Like Bloom, Durcan can look inwards but often seems most comfortable watching the city, the street, the society around him. Durcan’s narrators take delight in what happens. Even his indignation has a streak of dark delight.
But the poems can also be daring, directly personal as well as directly political. It is hard to think of another poet in these islands who has written such searing poems against violence and cruelty and the politics of hate. It is also difficult to think of another male poet who has written such brave works of self-examination. In his poems about his father, for example, or his marriage, or his solitude, Paul Durcan manages a desolation mixed with a fierce generosity of spirit, a hard-won sense of healing edged and tempered by an equally hard-won sense of loss and despondency.
[ Paul Durcan: the most playful poet in IrelandOpens in new window ]
Durcan’s public poems are risk-taking explorations of the intersection where tragedy and comedy meet in contemporary Ireland. He can put an antic disposition on, for example, to explode the power of the Catholic Church in a poem such as Cardinal Dies of Heart Attack in Dublin Brothel. In The Divorce Referendum, Ireland, 1986, on the other hand, his indignation at a sermon in a church is more unequivocal.
But Durcan’s dispute with the church and religion is essentially one that he also has with himself. The poems come from tensions in his own sensibility. He is torn between what is visible and material and what is numinous and strange. If he seeks transcendence, he wishes his deliverance to come from a place that is rooted and can be named.
Sometimes, Durcan gets enough energy and delight from the ordinary universe that he does not need to soar or reach towards easy grandeur. He is as wary of invoking pure, unmediated nature in a poem as he is of easily made phrases or fine-sounding images. Since there is a river in ‘Windfall’, 8 Parnell Hill, Cork, then there will also be, as viewed from a window, “factory chimneys,/The electricity power station and the car assembly works,/The fleets of trawlers and the pilot tugs,” and only then does he write: “The river a reflection of itself in its own waters.”
Sometimes also, in yoking two unlikely images together, Durcan can create an image of astonishing originality, as in the opening three lines of the second stanza of his poem The Pietà’s Over:
Durcan knows how to create an arresting opening for a poem, such as the first two lines of Raymond of the Rooftops: “The morning after the night/The roof flew off the house”, or the moment at the opening of Father’s Day, 21 June 1992 when it is clear that the narrator will have to travel with an axe – “all four-and-a-half feet of it” – on a train to Cork. But both of these poems then become melancholy, thoughtful, almost reticent, while holding on to the initial tone of mayhem and mischief. We watch Durcan as conjuror, capable of handling opposing tone with masterful and disquieting ease.
The poems have a casual, throwaway air. If Durcan is tempted to offer the end of a line a consoling soft sound, he will stop himself. If a poem is taking on the form of a ballad, he will cut back on easy transitions. He likes the untidy mind; he enjoys creating characters who are easily distracted and observe them talking or musing or watching. And then he focuses the poem with an unexpected turn in the diction or in the perception. He gives us a line of pure surprise.
Durcan has little interest in what is ridiculous. Broad comedy doesn’t interest him just as he avoids earnestness and solemnity. Rather, he favours what is desperately funny, or what might seem so. Tullynoe: Tête-à-Tête in the Parish Priest’s Parlour, one of his masterpieces, may be a poem about modernity arriving in a village, but more than that it is a great and grave comic poem.
Six Nuns Die in Convent Inferno, another of Durcan’s masterpieces, is, ostensibly, a poem of lament but it is also a celebration of the peculiarity of nunhood itself, its joys and strangenesses. Durcan lets the voice of the nun-narrator soar, lift up into the heavens, come back down to Earth in Dublin, in Stephen’s Green, land in a place of ordinary speech – “But I was no daw./I knew what a weird bird I was” – with many diversions along the way:
Just as Durcan can explore celibacy and bemoan solitude, he is a rare male contemporary poet who can write easily and naturally about his own heterosexuality. He is, as the title of one of his books suggests, “crazy about women”. He writes passionate love poems to his wife even after their marriage has ended.
Durcan, in general, is suspicious of what is perfect and complete. But if there is one poem in this book that approaches those conditions, it is a short poem – five four-line stanzas – from his 1978 volume Sam’s Cross. The poem is called Making Love Outside Áras an Uachtaráin. (The house of the President of Ireland was inhabited from 1959 to 1973 by Éamon de Valera whose severe and austere political persona would not have endeared himself to the young poet.
The poem begins effortlessly, the tone is casual, the line breaks natural. Durcan, it appears, has taken to heart what WB Yeats said: “Above all, it is necessary that the lyric poet’s life be known, that we should understand that his poetry is no rootless flower but the speech of a man.” Underneath the gravity of the poem’s speech, there is someone ready to burst with laughter. Underneath the laughter is a strange seriousness. Beside the wildness, there is tenderness. And these are the tensions that nourish Durcan’s imagination and give his poems their powerful and unsettling sound, that are here now distilled and given form.
This is the introduction to 80 at 80, a new selection of Paul Durcan’s finest poems, published in celebration of his 80th birthday on October 16th, and edited by Niall MacMonagle. The Gate Theatre will host a sold out evening to celebrate Durkan’s poetry on October 21st