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October-November 2025 61
Reading in the Durc
Paul Durcan’s
soft comic-
verse is mostly
indistinguishable
from whimsy
By Kevin Kiely
R
eviewing collections of poems for
Poetry Ireland Review in 2005, I
received a call after I’d filed,
querying a comparison — as
though I’d breached some critical
law of the poetic universe. This is what I’d
written and I didn’t change it:
“Overheard at a poetry reading — man’s
voice: ‘Rita Ann Higgins is the female Paul
Durcan’; woman’s voice: ‘Durcan is the male
Rita Ann Higgins’”.
‘80 at 80’ was the title for Poetry Ireland/
Gate Theatre tribute events in Dublin marking
Durcan’s 80th. Paul Durcan was royalty. He
died in May 2025, aged 80.
It recalled a 2024 book by Durcan (Harvill
Secker): a celebratory selection of 80 poems
published for his 80th birthday. It was edited
by Niall MacMonagle with a puy introduction
from Colm Tóibín who has long championed
Durcan (he also edited the 1996 essay
collection ‘The Kilfenora Teaboy’). The title
‘80 at 80’ desperately seeks a laugh, as if the
author had been caught speeding aged 80.
Tóibín’s introduction praises Durcan as an
outward-facing urban observer — “like
Bloom” in ‘Ulysses’ — he “can look inwards
but often seems most comfortable watching
the city, the street, the society around him”.
Tóibín recognises “a rare male contemporary
poet who can write easily and naturally about
his own heterosexuality”. It goes on and gets
worse: “He is, as the title of one his books
suggests, ‘crazy about women’; ‘risk-taking’
and about ‘to explode the power of the
Catholic Church’”. If only. And the
introduction’s knowing toadying quickly slips
into pretentiousness: “even his (Durcan’s)
indignation has a streak of dark delight”.
Durcan was no radical, nor did he ever
supply much commentary on society unless it
echoed the chuckle-verse of Rita Ann Higgins:
Scholrly remens noe boh he
performive person work nd he srin
of lddish bsurdism h risks flening
femle figures ino props for punch-line
a better artist, more socially conscious
political content. Both poets wannabe
stand-up comics. The performance-poetry
circuit has little patience for mere comic
verse: it expects high-grade confessional,
political bite, and sharpened satire — at the
outer edge, even the brinkmanship of battle
rap. In those sweaty rooms, 80 at 80 would
register as parochial, the sort of fare found at
poetry corner in Ireland’s Own — of the type
found years ago in Dublin Opinion
(1922–1968).
The skittery names of the poems give the
game away. Durcan’s signature is the tabloid-
style title that promises satire or farce but
delivers less: ‘Wife Who Smashed Television
Gets Jail’, ‘Cardinal Dies of Heart Attack in
Dublin Brothel’, ‘What Is a Protestant,
Daddy?’, ‘Tullynoe: Tête-à-Tête in the Parish
Priest’s Parlour’, and so on. ‘Wife Who
Smashed Television…’ is a Leaving Cert
staple, while ‘Cardinal Dies…’ and ‘What Is a
Protestant, Daddy?’ aim so typically high they
dupe us into hoping we’re going to get
insights. The headline energy often outruns
the poem. The parade of tittering titles
elongates to self-repetition: ‘The Day Kerry
became Dublin’; ‘Archbishop of Kerry to Have
Abortion’; ‘The Day my Wife Purchased Herself
a Handgun’; ‘The Man with Five Penises’.
The self-indulgence factor pervades ‘The
Kilfenora Teaboy’ which unconsciously
exposes the author as presumed city slicker,
mocking culchies: “I make all my tea for her,/
I’m her teaboy on the hill,/And I also thatch
her roof;/And I do a small bit of sheepfarming
on the side”.
Even sympathetic critics flag slackness and
self-satisfaction. Michael Kinsella’s Poetry
Ireland Review piece on The Art of Life (2004)
registers “instances of both types of poetic
extravagance”, conceding that Durcan “can
CULTURE
62 October-November 2025
again travels at someone else’s expense.
Contrast Durcan’s ‘comic public verse’ with
Rita Ann Higgins’s tougher social bite, and
with Christy Moore’s ‘Lisdoonvarna’: Higgins’s
demotic often sharpens into class critique,
and ‘Lisdoonvarna’ is lean, sung satire;
Durcan typically opts for rambling dramatic
monologue and headline shock. Dierent
instruments, dierent rooms, very dierent
levels of achievement.
Durcan’s messing around in the
confessional genre fails. ‘The Diculty that is
Marriage’ oers desultory pathos: “How was
it I was so lucky to have ever met you?/But I
should rather live with you for ever”. ‘Hymn to
a Broken Marriage’ concludes “A sane man
could not espouse a more intimate friend than
you”. This is vindication of Tóibín’s hyperbolic
thesis about his healthy manliness? ‘First
Mixed Party’ is strained anecdote with
punchline about the childhood recollection of
being reprimanded for wearing a black shirt
by his father (Judge John Durcan). The party
was hosted by Tom Doyle SC along Winton
Road o Dublin’s toney Appian Way — location
pencilled in for eect betraying Durcan’s
stued-shirt background. ‘Hymn to my Father’
be terribly indulged in his sentences”. He sure
can. The loud-hailer snap introduction of
Tóibín, archbishop of introductions to
Aosdána-folk, is close to hysterical:
“underneath the gravity of the poem’s
speech, there is somebody ready to burst into
laughter”.
‘The Woman Who Keeps her Breasts in the
Back Garden’ and ‘My Belovèd Compares
Herself to a Pint of Stout’ speak to Durcan’s
interview-poem manner and his unnecessarily
heterosexual self-presentation — precisely
the area Tóibín praises.
He can be faulted on basics, such as line
flow, transition, and technique.
But there are overarching problems of tone
led by the glut of dull colloquialism. It’s
mundane and patronising to note that Seamus
Heaney and John McGahern “looked like two
sheep farmers after coming out of Sunday
Mass/In their Sunday half-best/black slacks,
black slip-ons,/tweed jackets, open-neck
white shirts”. The “half-best” is probably
meant to be funny in his eort to caricature
two establishment figures.
The lines ‘inscribed’ to Seamus Heaney on
his seventy-second birthday titled
‘Sandymount Strand Keeping Going’ parody
TS Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’. The unrhymed terza
rima present an encounter between him and
Heaney who replies in mealy-mouthed
response to what the writing has ‘been all
about’: “What we must do must be done/On
our own. The main thing/Is to write for the joy
of it./The English language belongs to us”.
Heaney deigns another ‘appearance’ in
‘Breaking News’: “down the chimney rustled
Seamus’s antiphonal” followed by ‘Calm
down, I’m only dead, […]’ which elongates into
a sludgy soliloquy. Catastrophic in failed
artistic terms is ‘Six Nuns Die in Convent
Inferno’ with conclusion the “six nuns who
had died in the convent inferno” reappear in
the Stephen’s Green bandstand (across from
the place of their death) supposedly singing
a hymn: “the torch song/Of all aid — Live Aid,
Self Aid, Aids, and All Aid”. The impression is
crass baiting of clerics and nuns, indeed
anyone who had died in a fire. His humour too.
Scholarly treatments note both the
performative persona work and the strain of
laddish absurdism that risks flattening female
figures into props for a punchline. But the
Benny Hill stu can feel dated, even glib.
Titles like ‘A Snail in My Prime’ recall Spike
Milligan’s saturated-in-silly verse and the
formulaic-weird versifying of David McCord.
Nor does he reach Tom Lehrer’s on-target,
charged and politically lethal satire in the
likes of ‘That’s Mathematics’, ‘National
Brotherhood Week’, ‘The Vatican Rag’, ‘Fight
Fiercely, Harvard’ and his classic ‘The
Elements’.
Bluntly, his humour often fails. ‘The Berlin
Wall Café’ references obvious tourist sites
including Checkpoint Charlie, preceded by “I
was a most proper Charlie!” It’s twee and a
cringeful waste of ink.
Durcan’s work is often powered by
autobiography: the domineering father,
psychiatric incarceration in youth, and a
lifelong oscillation between tenderness and
rage. Obituaries and handbooks alike stress
his live readings — deadpan and then
suddenly explosive — which helped
popularise his public, Sunday-radio-friendly
mode. That publicness is central to the charge
sheet against him.
As a late-career sampler, ‘80 at 80’
reasserts Durcan’s range — sport, politics,
sex, clerical Ireland, marital breakdown —
while also revealing pattern and repetition.
Readers who thrill to the mix of satire and
sentiment will find ample hits; readers allergic
to the ‘gags’ will gag. For this critic the speed
is more correctly ‘well below the speed limit’
— let’s say 80 at 40.
Missiles of self-mockery regularly land on
other targets. In the bizarre stab at political
poetry ‘Apartheid’, the speaker feigns
ignorance of the term and oers: “Odd to
think that only this day last week in London/I
was having my twenty-seventh session of
Electric Convulsive Therapy/While today I am
sitting in the East Stand in Dublin” — a heavy
punchline hinting at racism in sport. ‘Ash
Wednesday, Dublin, 13 February 2013’
presents a “small, gay Dublin man with a
silver Chaplin moustache” musing on the
coming conclave: “it’s high time for a black
fellow”. The authorial voice replies with
pieties of its own — “for a black Archbishop of
Dublin” and “I will pray like a madman/For a
black woman Archbishop of Dublin” — and,
passing over the banality of madman, the joke
Missiles of self-mockery
regularly land on other
targets
October-November 2025 63
cranks along: “We had no life together — or
almost none” finding summation in “a man in
search of his Russia — go home to Russia this
very night” — the heavy metaphor implying a
generational gap as in faraway Russia. Why
Russia not Kerry?
‘Treasure Island’ at the Metropole Cinema
with Sheila MacBride slides into its oedipal
first movie-afternoon with “his young mother,
his first sweetheart?”. This must be the daring
Tóibín hints at in the humongous introduction.
“For the first time he understood/That the
price of knowledge is death and all of Dublin
would be a ‘Treasure Island”’. How searingly
banal.
It is more than thirty years since Edna
Longley wrote that Declan Kiberd in the ‘Field
Day Anthology’ “censors the Republic’s most
political and most popular poet – Paul Durcan.
An inconsistent fit of aestheticism (‘loose to
the point of garrulity’) cuts down Durcan’s
space and excludes his attacks on the IRA,
satires on the Catholic Church, and agony
over the Republic’s complicities in the
Northern horror”. However, ‘In Memory of
Those Murdered in the Dublin Massacre, May
1974’ when 26 civilians were killed on Talbot
Street in car bombs (claimed) by the UVF
factors in invective about “the heroic freedom
fighter” (seemingly amnesiac that it was a
UVF bombing) as he focuses on visiting a
Wimpy Bar café, eyeing the waitress: “She’d
make a mighty fine explosion now, if you were
to blow her up;/An explosion of petals, of
aeons, and the waitresses too, flying breasts
and limbs,/For a free Ireland”.
Kiberd also to his credit deliberately
omitted to anthologise ‘In Memory: The Miami
Showband — Massacred 31 July 1975’. The
lines, if they can be interpreted clearly, are a
jumble of jingoistic political point-scoring and
are artistically awkward, inept and inane. The
Miami Showband enjoyed a popularity that
equalled the Beatles’ in Ireland. One of its two
survivors, Stephen Travers, author of ‘The
Bass Player: Anthem for the Innocent’ is
witness to the shooting dead of his three
fellow musicians by the UVF and explicitly
blames the Glenanne Gang with collusion
from the UVF, UDR, RUC and British Army.
Numerous documentaries, articles (including
in Village magazine) and interviews are
overwhelmingly clear evidence as to the
killers.
Durcan’s divorce from the truth is crude. He
focuses on someone drinking in a pub, a pub
argument (supposedly) and caricaturing the
drinker as “patriotic” and a “versifier” with
the clumsy image “his mouth gapes like a
cave in ice” (of ice?). Purporting to be an elegy
such reflection as the following is lame: “You
must take one side or the other”. The lines
strain by sneering at someone whose “dream
gun blood-smeared” is meant to be rebutted
by these lines: “It is in war — not poetry or
music —/That men find their niche, their glory
hole”. The scenario is inane and fails to
address the massacre — if that was the
intention. There is the vaguest reference to
those murdered in a frail remark about the
musicians of the Miami Showband: “You
made music, and that was all: You were
realists”. Durcan’s grasp of the realities of war
are absent.
In ‘The Beckett at the Gate’ and ‘The Only
Man Never to Meet Samuel Beckett’, the
formula becomes transparent: threadbare,
lacking the poetic and yet not reaching the
surreal. ‘At the Funeral of the Marriage’: “We
had a cup of coee in the graveyard café//We
discussed the texture of the undertaker’s
face”.
‘80 at 80’ cannot claim engagement with
the poetical, and besides as comic verse
desperately grapples to reach the side-
splitting, less still the surreal. He is not deft
enough to deliver comedy at the same time as
other subtleties, nuances, and ultimately
poems. No Fergus Allen, Gavin Ewart; less still
Ogden Nash and Dorothy Parker.
Hardcore classical surrealism traded in real
poetry and having begun with their 1925
‘Declaration’ when André Breton, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard and Max Ernst claimed
“we have nothing to do with literature; But we
are quite capable, when necessary, of making
use of it like anyone else. We are specialists
in revolt/There is no means of action which we
are not capable, when necessary, of
employing.” Ranking with them are most of
the American Beats including Anne Waldman,
Djuna Barnes and Kenneth Koch. Supremos of
the surreal are David Gascoigne, George
Barker, Hugh MacDiarmid (CM Grieve), even
Updike; Robert Bly’s ‘A Poetry Reading at a
March Against the Vietnam War’ (1967), is a
peak of political surrealism.
Ireland has produced notable surrealists:
Niall Montgomery (rediscovered), Thomas
McGreevy, and Robert Greacen — if not
acutely surreal — wrote about British
contemporaries such as Ruthven Todd and
Charles Madge.
John Redmond’s critique places Durcan as
“jester to the middle classes” delivering the
titters, however he can “be re-categorized as
documentary rather than satire, it is scarcely
adequate as poetry”. Redmond accurately
faults “Durcan’s own talent, stripping it of its
subtlety and flexibility” with monocular lack
of perspective. He considers that his work’s
characteristic “playful distortion” and
“forceful subjectivity limits its use as political
discourse”. Redmond adduces the CJ Haughey
elevation of cultural insiders Durcan, Anthony
Cronin and the Aosdána clique.
Redmond goes on: “much of the (sometimes
too easy) comedy of his early work involves
mere juxtapositions of peculiar occupations,
a surgeon, as it were, introducing an umbrella-
maker to the operator of a sewing-machine”.
There is “an obsession with occupations” that
reflects petty snobbery and fear of social
realism: injustice, poverty, unemployment,
violence against women, crime, drug
addiction.
Brendan Lynch’s Dublin’s Baggotonia
neatly categorises the post-Mid-Century
dominated by Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan
Behan and Flann O’Brien while designating
later figures as hangers-on, peripheral
acolytes, sidekick prodigals, all strictly
networking careerists. He includes Leland
Bardwell, Anthony Cronin, Paul Durcan, John
Montague, and Michael Longley (among
others) with the direct implication that they
are minor poets.
Kevin Kiely has a PhD in the Patronage of
Modernist Poetry based on Harvard’s Edward
Woodberry Poetry Room. His recent
publications include The Principles of Poetry
DI + ID = Ψ Psi (Spa Cottage Publishing).
Hardcore classical surrealism
traded in real poetry and
claimed merely to use
literature for revolt and
action. Ranking with them are
most of the American Beats.
Durcan is minor
Aosdn: in there somewhere
