Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have my Being
Paul Durcan's twenty-second collection finds Monsieur le Poète on the road in Paris, New York City, Chicago, Brisbane, and Achill Island, meditating upon the sanctuary of home and what it means to feel truly at home. Regarded by many as the great poet of contemporary Ireland, Durcan is on top form here as he contemplates the fall of the Celtic Tiger, while railing against bankers and 'bonus boys'. There are poems of love lost and won, and poems in memory of friends and relatives who have passed on, but there is also joy to be found in the birth of a grandson, and there is praise, too, for the modest heroism of truckers, air traffic controllers and nurses, those 'slim, sturdy, buxom nourishers' of fallen mankind. If for Sartre 'hell is other people', for Durcan 'heaven is other people, especially women'.
The Selected Paul Durcan
" Irish Independent " British Book News.
Crazy about Women
None
The Art of the Caveman
The first monograph on the poetry of Paul Durcan, this book deals thematically with the dominant concerns evident from his first solo collection, O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor, published in 1975, up to, and including, The Days of Surprise, published in 2015. His work is marked by an unnerving emotional honesty and a recurring desire to undermine the pomposity of an Ireland struggling under the weight of inherited inconsistencies. One of the central arguments here is that Durcan has captured, more than any other poet of his generation, the complexities and contradictions inherent in Ireland’s emergence from the early, difficult decades of independence. The complex relationship between the public and private in his poetry is also explored, as well as the poet’s unflinching examination of his deepest personal relationships.
The Laughter of Mothers
'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.
Snail In My Prime
Since the publication of his first book in 1967, Paul Durcan has made satirical, celebratory and extraordinarily moving poetry out of his country's fortunes and misfortunes. His readings are legendary and each new collection, from his collaboration with Brain Lynch, Endsville (1967) to Daddy, Daddy (winner of the 1990 Whitbread Poetry Award), Crazy about Women (1991) and Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (1999) has borne out the truth of Ezra Pound's dictum that "literature is news that stays news". This book contains Durcan's own selection from his work. It is a literary milestone that has set the seal on his reputation as a poet of international standing.
Christmas Day
For most of us Christmas is the season of huge helpings of good food, good drink, and with luck, good cheer, as the rituals of cracker-pulling, present-giving and happy or sulphurous family reunions fizzle and bang through the long afternoon. For anyone who has ever had too much of it, or felt out of it, or wanted to be out of it, or even succeeded in being out of it then been unexpectedly rescued by a good friend, this book-length poem contains a lifeline of humour and sanity in a world run seasonally mad. It is a funny, subversive, melancholy, self-mocking conversation between two men - Paul and Frank - in the top storey flat of a Dublin apartment block; a Stations of Christmas under the influence of "woman-hunger". Once read, Christmas Day itself will never be the same again. The volume also contains a second new work, "A Goose in the Frost", a tribute to Seamus Heaney on winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.
A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015
A comprehensive and scholarly review of contemporary British and Irish Poetry With contributions from noted scholars in the field, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a collection of writings from a diverse group of experts. They explore the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that comprise these two distinct but interrelated national poetries. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companion to Literature and Culture series, this book contains a comprehensive survey of the most important contemporary Irish and British poetry. The contributors provide new perspectives and positions on the topic. This impo...
Daddy, Daddy
Critically acclaimed for his vibrant and eclectic "poetry of the present moment", Paul Durcan is one of the most dramatically intense modern Irish poets. Drawing its strength from its urgent treatment of a wide range of contemporary subject matter, Durcan's poetry is striking for the subtlety and strangeness of its unique imagery. In Daddy, Daddy Durcan pushes out in a radical new direction. Fusing the personal with the political, his angry response to violence and oppression in poems such as "The Murder of Harry Keyes" and "Shanghai, June 1989" is incisive and humane. Here also are love poems of all manner and kind; bizarre meditations on the nature of loneliness; and poems of celebration of writers and artists like Primo Levi, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Cezanne. Durcan also embarks on an exploration of his relationship with his father, creating poetry that is compelling in its probing artistry and painful honesty. --Publisher description
The Days of Surprise
WINNER OF THE LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IRISH BOOK AWARD 2014 Paul Durcan never imagined he would be clasped by a woman again, but life is full of surprises! After all, would it surprise you to learn that at the US Ambassador’s Residence in Dublin his libido almost destroyed the Peace Process? There is a new Pope, too, a ‘man of constant surprise’, although in St Peter’s Square Durcan encounters a monk wholly lacking in the Holy Spirit. Elsewhere he muses upon the ‘pre-crucifixion scenario’ of being prepared for surgery, the gift of a malacca cane, the joy of retail therapy, the horror that is wheel-clamping, the ‘starry mystique’ of the weather forecaster Jean Byrne, suicide, bird-watching, stammering, art, Mayo, New York City, New Zealand, murder in Syria and the commemoration of 1916. Perhaps the greatest surprise is the voice of the late Seamus Heaney coming down his chimney: ‘Are you all right down there, Poet Durcan?’ The Days of Surprise is proof that the great poet of contemporary Ireland is in fine fettle.
