The work of Paul Durcan, who died aged 80 on Saturday, will be familiar to many, as it featured on the Leaving Certificate English syllabus. Many of his poems are autobiographical and confessional. Below are some memorable lines from his life’s work.
“Every child has a madman on their street/ The only trouble about our madman is that he’s our father” Madman
“In 1949 in the black Ford Anglia/ Now that I had become a walking, talking little boy/ Mummy drove me out to visit my grand-aunt Maud Gonne/ In Roebuck House in the countryside near Dublin/ To show off to the servant of the Queen/ The latest addition to the extended family” The MacBride Dynasty
“I may not have been mesmeric/ But I had not been mediocre./ In your eyes I had achieved something at last./ On my twenty-first birthday/ I had played on a winning team/ The Grangegorman Mental Hospital team/ Seldom if ever again in your eyes/ Was I to rise to these heights“ Sport
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“On the way back I fell in the field/ And she fell down beside me./ I’d have lain in the grass with her all my life/ With Nessa:/ She was a whirlpool, she was a whirlpool,/ And I very nearly drowned” Nessa
“Bring me back to the dark school – to the dark school of childhood/ To where tiny is tiny, and massive is massive“ En Famille, 1979
“That was that Sunday afternoon in May/ When a hot sun pushed through the clouds/ And you were born!/ I was driving the two hundred miles from west to east/ The sky blue-and-white china in the fields/ In impromptu picnics of tartan rugs/ When neither words nor I/ Could have known that you had been named already/ And that your name was Rosie/ Rosie Joyce! May you some day in May/ Fifty-six years from today be as lucky/ As I was when you were born that Sunday“ Rosie Joyce
“Homeless in Dublin/ Blown about the suburban streets at evening,/ Peering in the windows of other people’s homes/ Wondering what it must feel like/ To be sitting around a fire“ Windfall, 8 Parnell Hill Dublin
“Next to the fresh grave of my beloved grandmother/ The grave of my first love murdered by my brother” Ireland 1972
“Dear Nessa – Now that our marriage is over/ I would like you to know that, if I could put back the clock/ Fifteen years to the cold March day of our wedding/ I would wed you again and, if that marriage also broke/ I would wed you yet again and, if it a third time broke/ Wed you again, and again, and again, and again, and again” Hymn to a broken marriage
“There – but for the clutch of luck – go we all” The Death By Heroin of Sid Vicious
“I got a Ryanair early flight back to Dublin,/ To settle my affairs and get ready for my own little sleep,/ Meeting my mother in the big deep” Il Bambino Dormiente
