Paul Durcan
Paul Durcan is a notable Irish poet born in Dublin to attorneys John and Sheila Durcan. He studied at University College, Cork, earning first-class honors before beginning his poetry career, which initially garnered limited attention. However, his collection "The Selected Paul Durcan" published in 1982 marked a significant turning point, elevating his reputation in the literary world. Known for his fierce independence and a distinctive voice that critiques various aspects of Irish society, Durcan employs a blend of sarcasm and reflection in his work. His poetry often engages with themes from both high art and popular culture, demonstrated through his collaborations with musicians like Van Morrison and his ekphrastic poetry inspired by visual art. Over the years, Durcan has received numerous accolades, including the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. His later works, such as "The Art of Life" and "The Laughter of Mothers," continue to explore personal and cultural themes with humor and insight. In recognition of his significant contributions to poetry, he received a lifetime achievement award at the Irish Book Awards in 2014. Durcan remains an influential figure in contemporary poetry, bridging traditional and modern influences.
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Subject Terms
Paul Durcan
Poet
- Born: October 16, 1944
- Place of Birth: Dublin, Ireland
Biography
Paul Durcan was born in Dublin, Ireland, to John and Sheila Durcan, both attorneys. Durcan attended University College, Cork, where he received first class honors. In 1969, Durcan married Nessa O’Neill and the couple had two children, Sarah and Siabbra, before separating in 1983.
Durcan’s career as a poet began slowly as his first four books received moderate and limited appraisal. However, when they were collected in 1982 as The Selected Paul Durcan, Durcan’s career began to take off. Although he had long had a reputation as a bitter, ironic poet of the ordinary and conversational, somewhat in the manner of Patrick Kavanagh, Durcan had, for the most part, flown below the radar, this despite having won the prestigious Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 1974 and having received a grant for creative writing from the Irish Arts Council in 1976 and in 1980. However, The Selected Paul Durcan changed all that as critics praised Durcan’s fierce independence—his poems parceled out sarcasm and blame equally to Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, Irish nationalists and British colonialists—and riveting readings.
Durcan continued to publish and receive critical acclaim for his poetry. In 1985, he won the Poetry Book Society’s award for a collection entitled The Berlin Wall Café and in 1990 he won the prestigious Whitbread Poetry Prize for Daddy, Daddy. Durcan’s fame as a poet also has another basis: his series of poems about paintings, both classical and contemporary. Durcan curated an exhibition of paintings at the National Gallery of Ireland and published a book of poems based on the works. He published another book of poems based solely on the paintings in the National Gallery in London, England.
These two books brought Durcan more critical praise. Given that they celebrated the traditional genre of ekphrasis—poetry based on paintings—Durcan, unwittingly or not, silenced those who regarded him as a flimsy, undisciplined performance poet. At the same time Durcan’s collaborations with pop/folk singer/songwriter Van Morrison and other Irish musicians reaffirmed his commitment to populist poetics. With both feet firmly planted in different, if not opposing, camps—the culture of high art and the culture of popular music—Durcan has managed to straddle the fence between an international modernity associated with certain English artistic traditions and regional Irish folk traditions.
Continuing mainly in the popular tradition over the next several years, Durcan published the slimmer volume The Art of Life in 2004 and followed up this work with the collection titled The Laughter of Mothers in 2008. The poems in both of these books maintained the brand of humor characteristic of his writing, with The Art of Life often taking on the subject of Irish Catholicism. The latter book builds on the success of Daddy, Daddy, which focused on his relationship with his father, by this time providing insight into his relationship with his mother. After the publication of a selection of his work titled Life Is a Dream: Forty Years Reading Poems 1967–2007 in 2009 came Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being (2012), which, like his previous works, contains several short poems that capture everyday conversations.
In honor of Durcan's ability to balance popular success with developing poetry as an art form, he was presented with the lifetime achievement award at the Irish Book Awards in 2014. The following year, still writing into his seventies, he published the collection The Days of Surprise, which critics praised for including poems on a wide variety of subjects and with disparate tones without becoming chaotic. In 2016, he published Wild, Wild Erie, a collection of poems inspired by paintings and sculpture in the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.
Bibliography
Brearton, Fran. "Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being by Paul Durcan—Review." Guardian, 30 Mar. 2012, www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/30/praise-live-paul-durcan-review. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.
"Interview: Paul Durcan on Poetry and Art." Spectator, 25 May 2012, www.spectator.co.uk/article/interview-paul-durcan-on-poetry-and-art/. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.
"Professor Paul Durcan." Ireland Chair of Poetry, irelandchairofpoetry.org/previous-professors/professor-paul-durcan/. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.
Wallace, Arminta. "Paul Durcan: The Most Playful Poet in Ireland." Irish Times, 17 Mar. 2015, www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/paul-durcan-the-most-playful-poet-in-ireland-1.2138673. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.
Yacobi, Tamar. "Ekphrastic Double Exposure and the Museum Book of Poetry." Poetics Today 34.1–2 (2013): 1–52. Print.
Yeonmin, Kim. "Paul Durcan's Ekphrasis: The Political Aesthetics of Hybridity." Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies 44.2 (2014): 381–97. Print.