Book description
'Thank you, O golden mother, / For giving me a life,' says Paul
Durcan in this brilliant new collection, a poignant tribute to 'the
first woman I ever knew'. Sheila MacBride came from a political family
- her uncle John MacBride was executed in 1916 for his part in the
Easter Uprising - but when Sheila married into the 'black,
red-roaring, fighting Durcans of Mayo' she was obliged to give up a
promising legal career. These poems commemorate his mother as Paul
Durcan remembers her playing golf, reading Tolstoy, and initiating him
in the magic of the cinema. He recalls her compassion and loyalty when
he was committed to a mental hospital in adolescence and how she
endured the ordeal of her old age.
Durcan also muses upon the beauty of Greek women and questions our
need for newspapers and the new religion of golf. He is beguiled by a
beggar woman, enraged by a young man picking his nose on the
Dublin-Sligo commuter train, and gets into difficulty at the security
gate of Dublin airport.
Paul Durcan was born in Dublin in 1944. His first book,
Endsville
(1967), has been followed by twenty-two others, including
The Berlin
Wall Café
(a Poetry Book Society Choice in 1985),
Daddy, Daddy
(winner of the Whitbread Award for Poetry in 1990),
Crazy About Women
(1991),
A Snail in My Prime: New and Selected Poems
(1993),
Give Me Your Hand
(1994),
Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil
(1999),
The Art of Life
(2004),
Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007
(2009), and
Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being
(2012). In 2001 Paul Durcan received a Cholmondeley Award. He was
Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2004 to 2007. He was conferred with a
DLitt by Trinity College Dublin in 2009 and by University College Dublin
in 2011. He is a member of Aosdána.
