Poetry:After Daddy, Daddy, The Laughter of Mothers. After The Berlin Wall Café the leap off the bridge at "Tarmonbarry/On the Roscommon side of the River Shannon", by the poet's mother along with "two other aged ladies,/Deborah O'Donoghue and Maureen Timoney". So all things return to their origins: the fantasy and the document arrive at the same place by a process that is not quite coincidence but poetry.
"Not quite coincidence but poetry" might be a definition of surrealism, the place where sewing machine and bowler hat find themselves all of a sudden on a dissecting table and, naturally, fall to singing. But that is French surrealism, a surrealism that is both more lyrical and more intellectual than what has counted for surrealism in Durcan, who is not an intellectual but a feasible poetic fantasist seriously set on what the English poet Charles Tomlinson claimed was the task of poets: lying for the improvement of truth.
His homing, however, is quieter than his setting out, and, like all returns, laced a little more than usual with sentimentality. Sentimentality is not intended here as a term of criticism, not necessarily, because Durcan's poetry has always had a fine sprinkling of the sentimental and the gestural. It is what has held the poems together and made him popular.
In his earlier work, the heart seized on the everyday and savaged it in spectacular fashion. Now it has grown a little tired of that game. Whereas the second half of the book, containing the poems in homage to his mother, is moving and grandiose and uplifting, rising on eddies of normality into the extraordinary, the first half of the book resolutely refuses to rise. A two-line poem, Newsdesk can be quoted in full: "The bad news is that I buy a newspaper every day./ The good news is that I do not read it". The really bad news is that this isn't a poem.
POETRY IS FEELING embodied in form. Much of the time - and this is part of our, sometimes justified, sentimentality - we privilege feeling above form and call that poetry. Although Durcan's poetry is written as verse its interest is not truly in verse. When it succeeds, and it can succeed magnificently, it does so because of its headlong powers of invention that rush and hustle the reader.
The poem, in Durcan's hands, is like a noisy bird flapping its big wings despite of grace. In the past its sharp beaks and claws have sought out the agents of repression: church, police, bourgeois order, the Berlin Walls of the spirit. There was ruefulness and regret and a good deal of staginess in its loose and sometimes sentimental manner but you could not accuse it of lack of spirit.
Once the boisterous cawing goes, once the agents of repression have retreated and the poem tries to assert itself by simplicity, anecdote and reflection, as it does in most of the first half of the book, the verse-as-verse is not quite strong enough to support it. There is no take-off point. It is only once the poems begin to deal directly with the figure of the mother that they have something to push against and so can gain elevation.
The mixture of history and myth, or document and fantasy is as we know it from earlier books, but here they have abandoned some of the theatricality that was both appealing and appalling in the weaker parts of the earlier work. As one moves through the mother poems the suspicion enters one's mind - if I may put it in such impersonal abstract terms - that one is reading a great single poem made of passion and regret that transcends sentimentality through sheer accumulation.
DURCAN IS ALWAYS hard to quote from because he depends on the momentum of his anecdotes - on accumulation in fact. It is what makes him an original - and most assuredly Durcan is an original, particularly in the use he makes of what Yeats famously referred to as "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart". So these few lines from The Deposition will have to do:
Contemplating the appalling
deposition of him,
His matted, stained, dried-up
skeleton,
The battered woman in her lilac
overcoat. . .
Wanting only to be beside him in the
next life
And for the pair of them not to be
cold,
Maybe under that Foxford rug we
bought in 1948
With the bunch of purple heather we
picked near Boniconlon.
It's so cold in this mortuary, isn't it?
So wretchedly cold.
Foxford, 1948, Boniconlon - the rag and bone shop will have those. It is so wretchedly, wretchedly cold.
George Szirtes's most recent book of poems, Reel (Bloodaxe, 2004), was awarded the TS Eliot PrizeGeorge Szirtes
The Laughter of Mothers By Paul Durcan Harvill Secker,131pp. £12