Paul Durcan made the mundane magnificent

We lost a great and wonderful man last week. Paul Durcan was born in Dublin but he was a Mayo man at heart. He was a poet for the ages. More prolific than Kavanagh, less serious than Heaney, Durcan was Ireland’s most entertaining poet. To hear him read his own poetry was to be transported, sometimes to heaven, sometimes to hell. He was unpredictable and could lead one into the most crazy mazes and endings. 

He was, of course, of Mayo people. His father, Judge John Durcan was from Castlebar, his mother was connected to Major John McBride, who, of course, married Maud Gonne. There was no love lost between the mother of the Durcans and Maud Gonne who “betrayed uncle John”.

In the poem The MacBride Dynasty, a young “walking, talking little boy” was brought by his mother to visit his bed-ridden grand-aunt, Maud. It was a fraught meeting:

Mother lifted me up in her arms as she approached the bed 

And Maud leaned forward, sticking out her claws 

To embrace me, her lizards of eyes darting about 

In the rubble of the ruins of her beautiful face.

Terrified I recoiled from her embrace 

And, fleeing her bedroom, ran down the stairs

Later in the poem, while he might have expected his mother to chastise him, he writes:

Mummy set great store by loyalty; loyalty 

In Mummy’s eyes was the cardinal virtue.

Maud Gonne was a disloyal wife 

And, therefore, not worthy of Mummy’s love.

For dynastic reasons we would tolerate Maud, 

But we would always see through her.

Searing stuff from a poet who could be hard as steel and soft as wool.

As seen in his poetry, Paul Durcan’s relationship with his father, the Circuit Court Judge, was difficult. John Durcan was your archetypical stereotype judge. Severe face, hooked nose, tight, closed lips, stern and forbidding. He stayed alone and aloof from the people who did business in his court. He was nicknamed “the adjourning judge”. He was cautious to a fault. He took his time making decisions and rarely got them wrong.

In Going Home to Mayo, winter 1949, leaving behind “the alien foreign city of Dublin,” the five-year-old boy poet urged his father:

Daddy, Daddy, I cried, pass out the moon 

But no matter how hard he drove he could not pass out the moon.

Each town we passed through was another milestone 

And their names were magic passwords into eternity;

Kilcock, Kinnegad, Strokestown, Elphin, Tarmonbarry, Tulsk, Ballaghaderreen, Ballavary;

Now we were in Mayo and the next stop was Turlough, 

The village of Turlough in the heartland of Mayo 

And my father’s mother’s house, all oil lamps and women 

And my bedroom over the public bar below.

How could Dublin lay claim to such a man? And don’t mention The Hay-Carrier:

Have you ever saved hay in Mayo in the rain?

Have you ever made hay in Mayo in the sun?

Have you ever carried above your head a haycock on a pitchfork?

Have you ever slept in a haybarn on the road from Mayo into Egypt?

He was a haycarrier, as was his father and mother and brother and sister and wife and their children. They were always haycarriers and will always be haycarriers until the culmination into those two great final lines:

For the great gate of night stands painted red 

And all of heaven lies waiting to be fed. 

Achhhhhh he was a grand man. No, he didn’t fall off the train going to Sligo, thinking he was going to the lavatory, but Durcan did spend time in Grangegorman and his father came to observe his son playing against Mullingar Psychiastrict Hospital. The son wished to impress the father.

I was fearful I would let down 

Not only my team, but you.

It was Gaelic football.

I was selected as goalkeeper.

There were big country men 

On the Mullingar Hospital team, 

Men with gapped teeth, red faces, 

Oily, frizzy hair, bushy eyebrows 

Their full forward line 

Were over six feet tall 

Fifteen stone in weight 

All three of them, I was informed, 

Cases of schizophrenia.

Grangegorman, on the basis of some wonderful goalkeeping, won by a cricket score, earning the poet a handshake and the sniffing approval “Well played, son”. While he had not been mesmeric, neither had he been mediocre. In his father’s eyes, he had “achieved something at last". 

On my twenty-first birthday, 

I had played on a winning team 

The Grangegorman Mental Hospital Team.

Then, there he was hopping around Knock in the rain with his broken leg as his aunt Sarah proved that while it was good to know God, it was better to get the ear of his mother.

The trick was to circumambulate the shrine fifteen times

Repeating the rosary, telling your beads.

And so: that is how I came to be 

Hopping around Knock Shrine in the falling rain.

There was no miracle. The trick did not work. But that is scarcely the point:

That day was a crucial day in the hedge school of belief 

In the potential of miracle 

In the actuality of vision 

And therefore I am grateful 

For my plateful 

Of hopping around Knock in the falling rain.

He was prolific, by times profane and preposterous, backside to the wind. He analysed the Mayo accent:

Have you ever tuned in to the voice of a Mayoman?

In his mouth the English language is sphagnum moss 

Under the bare braceleted feet of a pirate queen:

Syllables are blooms of tentativeness in bog cotton;

Words are bog oak sunk in understatement

These are just some of the Mayo stuff in Durcan’s voluminous bank of poetry. There are plenty of other poems that delight, entertain and mystify. Dublin, of course, gets a look in at The Cabinet Table. Alice Gunn was a cleaner woman down at Government Buildings, who never “touched sherry on a Saturday night” and she had her friends in stitches telling them:

How, one afternoon, after a cabinet meeting 

She got one of the security men 

To lie down on the Cabinet Table 

And what she didn’t do to him 

And what she did do to him

She didn’t half tell us 

But she told us enough to be going on with,

“Do you know what it is?” she says to me, 

“No says I, what is it?” 

“It’s mahogany,” she says, “pure mahogany.” 

Durcan was a prodigious poet. This is just the tip of the iceberg and fails miserably to do him justice.

I had the great good fortune once to hear Durcan read some of his poems. It was in the church of St Thomas in Dugort, Achill. I was, as usual, at the back of the church but when Durcan whispered, as was sometimes required, depending on the poem, his voice carried and kept his audience transfixed. He made the mundane magnificent. When reciting his work, he was, quite simply, mesmeric. He held his audience in the palm of his hand. And, nothing adorned his poetry like his reading of it.