Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being

by Paul Durcan

Paul Durcan's 22nd collection finds Monsieur le Poète on the road in Paris, New York City, Chicago, Brisbane, and Achill Island, meditating upon the sanctuary of home and what it means to feel truly at home. Regarded by many as the great poet of contemporary Ireland, Durcan is on top form here as he contemplates the fall of the Celtic Tiger, while railing against bankers and "bonus boys." There are poems of love lost and won, and poems in memory of friends and relatives who have passed on, but there is also joy to be found in the birth of a grandson, and there is praise, too, for the modest heroism of truckers, air traffic controllers and nurses, those "slim, sturdy, buxom nourishers" of fallen mankind. If for Sartre "hell is other people," for Durcan "heaven is other people, especially women."

Genres: Poetry

176 pages, Hardcover

First published March 29, 2012

About the author

Paul Durcan was an Irish poet.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Durcan’s copious bitter-sweet clowning is a way of telling the truth slant,” Seamus Heaney wrote in the Times Literary Supplement. That comment captures perfectly the tone of these poems: laughing at the absurdities of life, but also documenting the inescapability of death. Indeed, many of the poems are elegies to absent friends, as in these lines of tribute to Michael Carr: “That surely is who and what he was – / A brightening in the skies on days of blackest rain and coldest shores.” Durcan takes the very rain as a symbol of Irishness: “For ten thousand years the rain / Has been making us what we are.” That certainly makes it bleak and lonely at times, such that “the postman is somebody else – a one-man rescue service.”

What I liked best, though, were the comic poems, of which there are plenty. Here’s one short enough to quote in its entirety, “To be Ella or Not to be Ella”:

The day after they amputated Ella Fitzgerald’s legs –
She had diabetes –
One of her admirers exclaimed to her: “I’m so sorry!”
Ella cried: “I don’t sing with my legs, I sing with my voice!”

Quite a number are story poems, written in complete sentences without bothering about end rhymes. In these he documents his travels and some of the quirky people he’s met and odd situations he’s ended up in. Two of the funniest poems are “On Glimpsing a Woman in Hodges Figgis Bookshop in Dublin,” about being shocked to see a woman defacing a book – only to realize she was signing copies of her own work; and an “October Early Morning Haircut” from a broody Algerian, where Durcan plays on the close rhyme of “Berber” and “barber.”

It’s not all fun and games, though, as the elegies suggest. “No one should think in prose who finds his way / Into the original, terminal isolation of his mortal soul.”


Related reading: I was amused to find a poem titled “Michael Longley’s Last Poetry Reading” (as Ireland Professor of Poetry at Trinity College Dublin); I recently reviewed Longley’s Snow Water.

[Betheliza]

I went to see John Burnside speak at the British Library. In my head I had conflated John Burnside and Paul Durcan and I would have been happy with either and both. I obviously don’t get all the references in this work but I enjoyed it and will certainly re-read it. It has been another good book to read in the bath.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

First time I've come across his poetry, which probably shows my ignorance as this is his 22nd collection. I was a bit thrown though as the blurb on the book cover didn't really match up for me with the contents. Instead of "railing against bankers" there was an awful lot of "in memoriam" poems for friends and neighbours. Maybe he is going to a lot of funerals these days. Enjoyed it, but didn't get excited by it, just few wry smiles.