Paul Durcan

16 October 1944

Durcan grew up in a privileged middle-class family in Dublin and has

fond memories of his early days at their home at up-market Dartmouth
Square. "I think like most children I was enthusiastic about life. I was
probably too intense and excitable and the day was never long enough. I
think I was incredibly trusting and nave

Durcan says that it was the fact he didn't conform with his middle-class
family that landed him in a mental hospital along with his father's belief
that anything a doctor said was sacred

He had a very difficult relationship with his father who was a judge. He
was a very serious and strict man.

His mother was the niece of one of the famed republican martyrs of
1916, the husband of Maud Gonne, Major John MacBride

Leaving Cert Poetry H.L.

Ms Fitzpatrick

Poet Paul Durcan was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 16 October

1944. He was educated at University College, Cork, where he
studied archaeology and medieval history

His work is aggressively satirical, dedicated to exposing a range

of Irish ills: the hypocrisies of the church, the obfuscating
bureaucracy of state and the smug bourgeois affectations of
Dublin's 'chattering classes'.

His striking metaphors and dislocating images, result in a poetry

which is extraordinarily visual and frequently, surreal.

Celebrated for his dramatic and incantatory reading style he is,

above all, a risk taker, unorthodox in his use of prayer forms,
ballads, and free-flowing dramatic monologues, and relentlessly
iconoclastic in his treatment of contemporary life and events.

Over the years, in his work, he has distilled events that have
taken place in Irish society and marked them with verse

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Leaving Cert Poetry H.L.
Ms Fitzpatrick

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Leaving Cert Poetry H.L.
Ms Fitzpatrick

Nessa
The Girl with the Keys to Pearses
Cottage
The Difficulty that is Marriage
Wife Who Smashed Television Gets Jail
Parents
En Famille, 1979
Madman
Windfall, 8 Parnell Hill, Cork
Six Nuns Die in Convent Inferno
Sport
Fathers Day, 21 June 1992
The Arnolfini Marriage
Ireland 2002
Rosie Joyce
The MacBride Dynasty

THE DIFFICULTY THAT IS MARRIAGE

Leaving Cert Poetry H.L.

Ms Fitzpatrick

We disagree to disagree, we divide, we differ;

Yet each night as I lie in bed beside you
And you are faraway curled up in sleep
I array the moonlit ceiling with a mosaic of question-marks;
How was it I was so lucky to have ever met you?
I am no brave pagan proud of my mortality
Yet gladly on this changeling earth I should live for ever
If it were with you, my sleeping friend.
I have my troubles, and I shall always have them
But I should rather live with you for ever
Than exchange my troubles for a changeless kingdom.
But I do not put you on a pedestal or throne;
You must have your faults but I do not see them.
If it were with you. I should live for ever.

Leaving Cert Poetry H.L.

Ms Fitzpatrick

THE ARNOLFINI MARRIAGE

"Wife Who Smashed Television Gets Jail"

(From "Teresa's Bar" 1976)
"She came home, my Lord, and smashed in the television;
Me and the kids were peaceably watching Kojak
When she marched into the living room and declared
That if I didn't turn off the television immediately
She'd put her boot through the screen;
I didn't turn it off, so instead she turned it off
I remember the moment exactly because Kojak
After shooting a dame with the same name as my wife
Snarled at the corpse Goodnight, Queen Maeve
And then she took off her boots and smashed in the television;
I had to bring the kids round to my mother's place;
We got there just before the finish of Kojak;
(My mother has a fondness for Kojak, my Lord);
When I returned home my wife had deposited
What was left of the television into the dustbin,
Saying I didn't get married to a television
And I don't see why my kids or anybody else's kids
Should have a television for a father or mother,
We'd be much better off all down in the pub talking
Or playing bar-billiards
Whereupon she disappeared off back down again to the pub."
Justice O'Brdaigh said wives who preferred bar-billiards to
family television
Were a threat to the family which was the basic unit of society
As indeed the television itself could be said to be a basic unit of
the family
And when as in this case wives expressed their preference in
forms of violence
Jail was the only place for them. Leave to appeal was refused.

Leaving Cert Poetry H.L.

Ms Fitzpatrick

Madman

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by Paul Durcan
Leaving Cert Poetry H.L.
Ms Fitzpatrick

Every child has a madman on their street :

The only trouble about our madman is
he's our father

Rosie Joyce
I

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:
To drive such side-roads, such main roads, such ramps, such
roundabouts,
To cross such bridges, to by-pass such villages, such towns
As I did on your Incarnation Day.
By-passing Swinford Croagh Patrick in my rear-view mirror
My cell phone rang and, stopping on the hard edge of P. Flynns highway,
I heard Mark your father say:
A baby girl was born at 3.33 p.m.
Weighing 7 and a I/2 Ibs in Holles Street.
Tough work, all well.

Leaving Cert Poetry H.L.

Ms Fitzpatrick

That was that Sunday afternoon in May

When a hot sun pushed through the clouds
And you were born!

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On the 2nd of June 1986, an appalling disaster struck at

the heart of the Loreto order on St Stephens Green.

Leaving Cert Poetry H.L.

Ms Fitzpatrick

Six Nuns Die in Convent Infern

o

The MacBride Dynasty

Only the previous week the actor MacLiammir

Had been kneeling at her bedside reciting Yeats to her,
His hand on his heart, clutching a red rose.
Cousin Sen and his wife Kid led the way up the stairs,
Sen opening the door and announcing my mother.
Mummy 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.

Leaving Cert Poetry H.L.

Ms Fitzpatrick

What young mother is not a vengeful goddess

Spitting dynastic as well as motherly pride?
In 1949 in the black ford Anglia,
Now that I had become a walking, talking little boy,
Mummy drove me out to visit 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.
Although the eighty-year-old Cathleen N Houlihan had taken to her
bed
She was as keen as ever to receive admirers,
Especially the children of the family.

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Leaving Cert Poetry H.L.
Ms Fitzpatrick

Terrified, I recoiled from her embrace

And, fleeing her bedroom, ran down the stairs
Out onto the wrought-iron balcony
Until San caught up with me and quieted me
And took me for a walk in the walled orchard.
Mummy was a little but not totally mortified;
She had never like Maud Gonne because of Mauds
Betrayal of her husband, Mummys Uncle John,
Major John, most ordinary of men, most
Humorous, courageous of soldiers,
The pride of our family,
Whose memory always brought laughter
To my grandmother Eileens lips. John,
She used cry, John was such a gay man.
Mummy set great store by loyalty; loyalty
In Mummys eyes was the cardinal virtue.
Maud Gonne was a disloyal wife
And, therefor, not worthy of Mummys love..
For dynastic reasons we would tolerate Maud,
But we would always see through her.

The Girl with the Keys to Pearses Cottage

The cottage was built into the side of a hill;

I recall two windows and a cosmic peace
Of bare brown rooms and on a whitewashed walls
Photographs of the passionate and pale Pearse.
I recall wet thatch and peeling jambs
And how all was best seen from below in the field;
I used to sit in the rushes with ledger-book and pencil
Compiling poems of passion for Cit Killann.
Often she used linger on the sill of a window;;
Hands by her side and brown legs akimbo;
In sun-red skirt and moon-black blazer;
Looking toward our strange world wide-eyed;
Our world was strange because it had no future;
She was America-bound at summers end.
She had no choice but to leaver her home
The girl with the keys to Pearses cottage
O Cit Killann, O Cit Killann,
You have gone with your keys from your own native place.
Yet her in this dark El Grecos eyes blaze back
From your Connemara postmans daughters proudly mortal face.

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Leaving Cert Poetry H.L.
Ms Fitzpatrick

When I was sixteen I met a dark girl;

Her dark hair was darker because her smile was so bright;
She was the girl with the keys to Pearses Cottage;
And her name was Cit Klllann.

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Do you ever take a holiday abroad?

No, we always go to America.

Leaving Cert Poetry H.L.

Ms Fitzpatrick

Ireland 2002

from sombre to delightfully offbeat

humour

zany observations
mock-solemnity

magic realism

Hilarity
stiletto-sharp

Leaving Cert Poetry H.L.

Ms Fitzpatrick

Wickedly sharp powers of observation

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troubled

searing

Journalistic
Headlines

an intense soul