Paul Durcan, an Irish poet whose droll, sardonic and frequently tender poems about lads in dimly lit pubs, quotidian life in the countryside and the trauma of political violence made him one of Ireland’s most popular writers of the 20th century, died on May 17 in Dublin. He was 80.
His death, in a nursing home, was caused by age-related myocardial degeneration, his daughter Sarah Durcan said.
In the annals of long-suffering poets, Mr. Durcan’s hardships probably merit special distinction. After he set about becoming a writer in the 1960s, his father — a hidebound judge who called him a “sissy” — apparently sent family members to remove him from a Dublin pub and then had him committed to a psychiatric hospital.
Mr. Durcan suffered through several years of electroshock treatments. He feared he would be lobotomized.
“I was seen as going the way of a poet,” he once said, “and that had to be stopped.”
After running away the hospital, Mr. Durcan sought out fellow poets for assistance and mentorship, including Patrick Kavanagh, who helped him publish his work. Mr. Durcan channeled the trauma of his father’s emotional abandonment and the horrors of psychiatric wards into an unmistakable voice on the page.
“Durcan’s abundant imagination has indeed left us a universe of iconoclastic poems that combine art and everyday life, insight and originality,” the poet Gerard Smyth wrote in The Irish Times after Mr. Durcan’s death. “He was one of the great mavericks, a literary phenomenon with a commitment to poetry as a calling.”
Mr. Durcan was the author of more than 20 collections of poetry. Several of his poems were included alongside those by John Keats, Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath on the syllabus for Ireland’s Leaving Certificate in English, a compulsory test for secondary-school students.
In one poem, “Six Nuns Die in Convent Inferno,” Mr. Durcan takes on the resigned voice of someone speaking from the heavens:
Isn’t it a marvellous thing how your hour comes
When you least expect it? When you lose a thing,
Not to know about it until it actually happens?
How, in so many ways, losing things is such a refresh-
ing experience
In another, “Wife Who Smashed Television Gets Jail,” Mr. Durcan describes a woman returning home from the pub only to find that her husband, watching television, will not turn away from an episode of “Kojak.” She shuts off the TV permanently with her boots, then returns to the pub.
A judge rules that wives who prefer playing pool in bars to watching television at home are a threat to society, as the TV itself is “a basic unit of the family”:
And when as in this case wives expressed their prefer-
ence in forms of violence
Jail was the only place for them. Leave to appeal was
refused.
Many of Mr. Durcan’s poems dealt with the Troubles in Ireland. “In Memory of Those Murdered in the Dublin Massacre, May 1974” is narrated by a man in a pub who had been watching an old woman clean the floor. As he leaves, she is leaning on her mop, trembling “like a flower in the breeze”:
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 what?” the narrator seems to be thinking:
For a free Ireland.
In his collection “Daddy, Daddy” (1990), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award, Mr. Durcan took on father figures. “Mother’s Boy” is about a racehorse of the same name that belongs to a man whose son, the narrator, is a poet. The narrator wonders whether his father prefers him or the horse:
Horses are spiritual animals
Whereas poets are neither
Spiritual or animal,
On average a bit of both
In a grey self-indulgent way.
Paul Francis Durcan was born on Oct. 16, 1944, in Dublin to John and Sheila (MacBride) Duncan. His father was a barrister and circuit court judge. His mother was a solicitor who, by law, had to quit after marrying. She was also the niece of W.B. Yeats’s muse Maud Gonne.
At 13, Paul was hospitalized for several months with a rare bone disease. The experience left him unable to play sports, marking the beginning of his estrangement from his father.
“From a fairly early age, I was aware that certain kinds of people disapproved of me — particularly certain kinds of males,” he said in the documentary “Paul Durcan: The Dark School” (2007), directed by Alan Gilsenan. “My father would say: ‘Paul is a sissy. Come on, be a man.’”
At University College Dublin, he hung out with poets and other literary types, living a bohemian lifestyle that his parents — in particular, his father — disapproved of intensely. One evening, in 1964, he was in a pub when two family members walked in.
“I knew from instinct they were not there for my good health,” he said in the documentary. “So I ran out the back door onto the street and saw another one of them.”
Mr. Durcan was tackled and brought home. Soon, a psychiatrist arrived and administered an injection, and he was whisked off to a psychiatric ward. Doctors insisted that he was mentally ill, probably schizophrenic. Mr. Durcan contended that he was not sick; he was a poet.
After three years spent in and out of psychiatric facilities, he finally broke free — but with scars.
“There are two shadows on my soul that stayed forever: melancholia and depression,” Mr. Durcan said in the documentary. “I attribute both of them to the heavy physical bombardment and the things I saw there, some of which I wasn’t able to cope with.”
Soon after, he met Nessa O’Neill, a meeting he described in the poem “Nessa”:
She took me by the index finger
And dropped me in her well.
And that was a whirlpool, that was a whirlpool,
And I very nearly drowned.
They married in 1969 and separated in the 1980s, but Mr. Durcan continued writing love poems about her.
In addition to their daughter Sarah, she survives him, along with another daughter, Síabhra Durcan; a son from a different relationship, Michael O’Neill; and nine grandchildren.
As the years went by, Mr. Durcan’s feelings about his father softened.
“I wrote what I wrote,” he said in The Irish Independent, “but I realize that some people have formed too black an impression of him. He took his job as a judge unbelievably seriously, and it definitely made him more melancholic. It took its toll on him.”
Still, his father would probably have been gobsmacked by the pageantry that surrounded his son’s death.
Michael Higgins, the president of Ireland and a poet himself, attended the funeral. The music included “In the Days Before Rock ’n’ Roll,” a song Mr. Durcan wrote and recorded with Van Morrison in 1990. And the actor Mark O’Regan read Mr. Durcan’s poem “The Days of Surprise,” which describes Ringsend, the small village where he lived:
The charity shop, the wine shop, the humpbacked bridge,
Under which, behind Ringsend Church, the River
Dodder flows,
Like a little mare over the last fence.
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