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The literary community was greatly saddened to hear of the recent death of the great poet, Paul Durcan, aged 80.
He was born in Dublin in 1944 and began his literary career six decades ago with his first book 'Endsville', which was followed by more than 20 others. A winner of the Whitbread Poetry Prize and the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, Durcan was also the recipient of the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Irish book awards where commentator Niall McMonagle described him as providing a "soundtrack for our lives".
The award citation read as follows:
Few poets have managed to reconcile popular success with the careful cultivation of their art as successfully as Paul Durcan. Throughout a long career spanning five decades, Durcan has given us fierce satirical poems which challenge the orthodoxies of materialism, sexism, authoritarianism, the Church, and the violence of nationalism. His poetry has been described as Whitmanesque for its heterogeneity, for the way in which the everyday, current affairs, politics and love are made to seem congenial bedfellows.
A Paul Durcan public reading is like no other. Audiences come away drained and cleansed as if from a secular mass. He can be funnier than any stand-up, dramatic as any actor, but once heard, the sotto voce incantatory style is never forgotten. His style owes much to what he has called “the essence of the common language” which is perhaps what has enabled him to bridge poetry’s infamous gulf of difficulty.
A video of the 2014 awards ceremony can be viewed at this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM2wcQ1dvQk
Paul Durcan image - Mark Condren