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.
