Paul Durcan, who died on Saturday, was one of the best-loved and most powerful voices in Irish poetry.
The poet Michael Hartnett, a contemporary and friend, wrote a poem in dedication to Durcan in the early 1970s that contained a prescient image of the future poet and his role as a public voice: “Let the bourgeoisie beware…/ this head is a poet’s head / this head holds a galaxy.”
Durcan’s abundant imagination has indeed left us a universe of iconoclastic poems that combine art and everyday life, insight and originality.
He was one of the great mavericks, a rare literary phenomenon with a commitment to poetry as a calling.
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From the remarkable poems of his youth, Durcan was never going to conform to the niceties of lyric verse or to any fashion or trend in his art. Instead he became a poet in revolt, one with zestful imaginative instincts when it came to language and the narrative.
After a critically-acclaimed debut collection, O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor – the title reflects his family ties to the west of Ireland and his attentiveness to a wider world and its misdeeds – he marked out new and unexpected subject matter in the Irish poem.
His thematic range was broad and inclusive, many of his poem titles remind us that he was a poet submerged in Irish social and political life, a witness to public events: The Divorce Referendum, Ireland, 1986; In Memory of Those Murdered in the Dublin Massacre, May, 1974; The Mary Robinson Years.
As one critic has pointed out, he was unrelenting in his exposure of “hypocrisy, deceit and repression”.
Much of his work is autobiographical. His confessional poems of breakdown in familial relationships, especially those in the collection Daddy, Daddy, are piercingly honest on this difficult theme. He was resolute and daring when it came to lambasting those responsible for atrocities committed during the years of conflict in Northern Ireland.
Durcan’s public readings were renowned events. He was a masterful performer of his work who entranced his audiences with hypnotic monologues. He could be extremely funny, knew how and when to strike the comic note, but the humour always had a razor edge to it.
Alert to the social and cultural changes in Irish society the goal of his writing, as critic Alan Gillis has noted, was “to bring attention to what’s in front of our eyes”.
