Tag Archives: Listowel Writers’ Week

Irish performance poet Paul Durcan is dead at 80

Irish poet Paul Durcan has died in Dublin. He was 80. His “contribution to the performed poem was of enormous importance to the appreciation of poetry in Ireland,” Irish President Michael D. Higgins said.

In his introduction to the poet’s 80th birthday collection, 80 at 80, Irish writer Colm Tóibín said 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.” Tobin continued:

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.

Paul Durcan

My wife and I attended a Durcan reading at the 2012 Listowel Writers’ Week, the year he published Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have my Being. The reading occurred in a ballroom at the historic Listowel Arms Hotel on the town’s main square. Durcan sat with his back to a large bank of windows, beyond which the lovely River Feale shimmered in the long, lingering dusk of the approaching summer solstice.

Durcan read from his new collection, including “On the First Day of June,” which happened to be the date of the performance. He exclaimed:

I was walking behind Junior Daly’s coffin
Up a narrow winding terraced street
In Cork city in the rain on the first day of June …

The poem describes how Daly and his friend John Moriarty had died 12 minutes apart, each from “the same Rottweiler of cancer,” and now their spirts stood together watching the mourners inside Cork city’s North Cathedral. “Christ Jesus, Junior, wouldn’t you want to lift up their poor heads in your hands like new baby potatoes and demonstrate them to the world,” Moriarty says. The poem concludes:

… Outside in the streets and the meadows
In Cork and Kerry
On the first day of June on the island of Ireland
Through the black rain the sun shown.

This poem about the swiftness of life and the suddenness of death still brings a shudder of emotion to me, a watering of the eye. It is not Durcan’s best poem; he did not selected it for 80 at 80. But the delightful serendipity of hearing Durcan read the poem on the date of its title, in such a lovely setting, made this one of my favorite moments in Ireland. It remains so seven visits and 13 years later.

After Durcan’s performance I stood in line for nearly 30 minutes to have the poet sign–and date–a copy of his new volume, which I purchased for my wife. I was anxious to join her and some dear cousins in the hotel bar. But I am grateful that my patience prevailed.  

Catching up with modern Ireland: March

There’s only one story to report in this month’s roundup: the COVID-19 pandemic, which exploded in Ireland and across the globe shortly before St. Patrick’s Day and soon cancelled parades, closed pubs and churches, and cloistered communities. As history’s longest March draws to a close, here are some key developments from the island of Ireland:

  • A combined 67 people have died, and more than 3,000 have tested positive for COVID-19, in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland as of March 29. Sadly, these numbers will grow.
  • Citizens of the Republic are on strict quarantine through April 12, Easter Sunday. Gardaí are patrolling the streets to enforce the lock down.
  • The Republic nationalized all its hospitals. “For the duration of this crisis the State will take control of all private hospital facilities and manage all of the resources for the common benefit of all of our people,” Ireland’s Health Minister Simon Harris said. “There can be no room for public versus private when it comes to pandemic.”
  • Aer Lingus completed the first of 10 scheduled round trips to bring personal protective equipment (PPE) from China to Ireland in a €208m deal, RTÉ reported March 29.

Leo Varadkar, who remains Ireland’s caretaker taoiseach after February’s election defeat, is a trained doctor. His handling of the COVID-19 crisis has generally been praised. Steve Humphreys/Pool via REUTERS

  • In the midst of the pandemic, the Republic is still trying to forge a new government. The Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil political parties, both center right but historic rivals, are reported to be nearing a deal on a new administration in the coming weeks. The left-wing Sinn Fein, which topped the Feb. 8 election, would be kept … well … isolated.
  • The Irish people paused March 26 to applauded healthcare and front line workers fighting the pandemic. “In the Dáil, TDs stood at the allotted hour, forgetting their discussions of emergency measures for a brief moment to clap with gusto in appreciation of the hundreds of battles being fought by medical staff around the country,” The Irish Times reported. In the North, the “Clap for Carers” tribute featured buildings lit blue and cathedrals ringing bells.
  • Irish Ambassador to the United States Dan Mulhall advised Irish citizens in America, especially those on short-term visas, to return to Ireland, “if there are doubts about the stability of your employment & your access to health care cover.”
  • The 50th Listowel Writers’ Week in North Kerry, scheduled for May 27-31, was postponed until 2021.
  • As encouragement to the people, Irish President Michael D. Higgins recorded his 27-year-old poem Take Care. Click the SoundCloud link in the tweet below:

Supporting books and bookstores in the U.S. and Ireland

UPDATE:

Here are the winners.

ORIGINAL POST:

On our way back from a long, post-election weekend on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, my wife and I stopped at Unicorn Bookshop on U.S. Rt. 50, which offers “a full range of secondhand books, everything from the average to the rare.” We walked out with an armful of books, though I couldn’t find any Irish-related titles of interest.

BGE IBA brand mark CMYK blue 2015On 16 November, Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards will announce the winners of this year’s contest at a gala ceremony in Dublin. Established in 2007 by a coalition of Irish booksellers, “the over-riding motivation behind the awards is to celebrate the extraordinary quality of Irish writing, to help bring the best books to a wider readership annually, and to promote an industry under severe competitive pressures,” the contest website says.

Winners are decided by an online web-poll divided into two constituencies, a public vote and a specialist Academy vote, weighted equally and combined to produce the winners. The Academy includes 300 booksellers, librarians, non-shortlisted authors, reviewers, and journalists.

See the shortlist for Fiction Awards in 10 categories, including the Listowel Writers Week Poem of the Year. Nonfiction Awards are being contested in six categories, including cookbook and sport.

 

On the First Day of June

On the first day of June, 2012, my wife and I attended the Listowel Writers’ Week, which this year opens on the same date. We attended a reading by poet Paul Durcan at the Listowel Arms Hotel, the lovely River Feale shimmered outside the ballroom window, just beyond where the poet sat at a small platform.

A highlight of the performance was his reading of “On the First Day of June.”

I was walking behind Junior Daly’s coffin
Up a narrow winding terraced street
In Cork city in the rain on the first day of June …

… Outside in the streets and the meadows
In Cork and Kerry
On the first day of June on the island of Ireland
Through the black rain the sun shown.

Four years later, it remains one of my favorite moments in Ireland.