Paul Durcan

That Paul Durcan finally made his way onto the Leaving Cert English syllabus in 2016 gives me no end of joy. To me, Durcan is a true poet; unafraid to speak out against the injustices he witnesses and willing to vocally criticise the institutions or individuals he sees damaging society. A master of satire, he uses humour like a knife to: ‘challenge the orthodoxies of materialism, sexism, authoritarianism, the Church and the violence of nationalism.’ (Board of the Irish Book Awards).

He also explores domestic concerns in great depth; love, marriage, his relationship with his parents, his ex-wife, and his children and grandchildren. He is brutally honest about his life experiences, sharing details about his difficult relationship with his father, his time in a mental institution and his marital breakdown. He says himself: “I’m trying to record, in verse, a moment – like a photograph – things that happened.’

Both his use of language and his references are modern and therefore very accessible to Leaving Cert students. As Ciara Dwyer said: ‘the beauty about Durcan’s poetry is that it is of this world and, in particular, very much of Ireland.’

He uses colloquial language as a standard and is frequently so laugh-out-loud funny that students often wonder how he was allowed on the course at all! From ‘Sport’ his hilarious tale of football match between Grangegorman Mental Hospital and Mullingar Mental hospital:

Their full forward line

Were over six foot tall

Fifteen stone in weight.

All of them, I was informed,

Cases of schizophrenia.

He is famous for writing ‘public poems’ with titles that mimic a newspaper headline and verse that reads more like a news report than a poem. ‘Six Nuns Die in Convent Inferno’ and ‘Woman Who Smashed Television Gets Jail’ would be the two examples from the Leaving Cert course. Both poems are deeply unusual, both in content and style, and are open to multiple interpretations. He writes in a deliberately provocative way to force the reader to question the norms of society, for example, in ‘Wife Who Smashed Television..’ a Judge declares the television to be ‘a basic unit of the family’ and gives the woman of the house jail time for destroying one.

He eschews traditional poetic forms and metre favouring free verse. In response to those who accuse him of presenting prose as poetry he stated: ‘So much of it is free verse, yes, but I feel it’s every bit as strict a form as the sonnet. There is only one right word. You must find that word. The other part is music. All art aspires to the condition of music, so what you hear must sound right.’ When you read his poetry out loud or hear Durcan himself reading his poetry out loud (go to YouTube right this second if you haven’t yet) then you immediately hear the music and flow of his unique style.

The poem that most effects me at the moment, considering that homelessness has almost tripled in this country over the past four years (Focus Ireland figures) is ‘‘Windfall’ 8 Parnell Hill, Cork’. In this long, meandering poem he explores what home means to people from the perspective of someone who has just lost theirs due to marital breakdown.

Are you anxious to get home?...

I can’t wait to get home…

Let’s stay at home tonight and…

If I’m not at home by six at the latest, I’ll

phone…

We’re nearly home, don’t worry, we’re nearly

home…

He realises the safety and comfort home brings – not just the four walls of a house but having people who care about you and worry about you to go home to. The feeling of loss and longing is palpable throughout the poem:

It is an eerie feeling beyond all ornithological analysis

To be homesick knowing that there is no home to go home to:

Day by day, creeping, crawling, Moonlighting, escaping, Bed-and-breakfast to bed-and-breakfast; Hostels, centres, one-night hotels.

Here, even though the poem dates from 1985, he has vividly captured what an obscenely large number of people in Ireland are experiencing today. Students should read all Durcan’s poems that feature on the course and think about which ones connect with them the most to prepare well for the exam.