Paul Durcan has a facility that is his best friend and worst enemy. He is the author of 22 books of poetry and his muse shows no sign of wishing to put her feet up. Of all his writings, the volume that most captivated me was Give Me Your Hand (1994), a theatrical gathering of poems inspired by paintings in London's National Gallery. But in this volume, the leading man is Durcan himself, and "leading" – as he might allow – is seldom the right verb. What is described here is vulnerability, depression, loneliness, bad luck in love, hours moping in Parisian cafes and eavesdropping in Dublin bookshops. Yet whatever the subject, venue or city, and no matter how bitter the moment, Durcan has wit, charm and spark. Poetry is his – and our – rescuer.
The collection advertises itself as celebratory, and it is, but mainly of casual acquaintance: "Dymphna who taught me about online banking" (the poem lives up to its wonderful title), "The Docker at Eighty Walking His Dog in the Snow", and nameless nurses: "To have women at your hospital bedside,/Emptying buckets of tenderness over your head,/ Hosing you down with solicitude/ Is something ridiculously out of the ordinary./Prayer would seem abstract by comparison." Durcan's Algerian barber is awarded a frisky poem, too ("October Early Morning Haircut"). More disturbing are the poems where intimacy is in the offing. "Idolatry" is about the sudden, shocking end of a friendship with a woman. He describes seeing her on the other side of the road in "silver grey scarf" and "low black heels", looking back with "such horror" in her eyes. It is not possible to read this poem without worrying about the life. There is even a spry poem about contemplating suicide, "Sick of Acquaintances Who Are Know-Alls": "I walk to the cliff, the sea 300 feet below. / The farmer-woman of the ocean, / Churning the green and the white." This is such a healthy, pleasant, busy image that it does not prepare one for the last lines, which – if their meaning were not so terrible – one might dismiss as lame:
"How idiotic it would be to jump. /How idiotic it is not to jump."
There are times when Durcan comes across as a 67-year-old Irish equivalent to Lear's fool, with his clowning voice of truth and bitter-sweetness. Yet he has what Lear's fool did not believe in: the gift of being able to make something out of nothing. "Woman, Outside" might seem to be no more than poetry's equivalent to a gossip over a garden fence. But it has a lovely, unforced, conversational vitality and a masterly ending – with its changed tone, collapse into regret and reversion to being no more than what one assumes to be the title of a painting:
"Who is that outside my window?/ Woman, outside."
These poems are a pleasure to read – sometimes an uncomfortable pleasure. Some may have come too easily, but one is grateful for their rare openness and for the way, even when set in New York, Paris and elsewhere, they return one to Ireland. Durcan makes particularly engaging poems out of passing conversations (reminding one of what virtuosos the Irish are at small talk). "Michael Dan Gallagher Down at the Sound, 10.30am" has a title longer than either of its lines. But after reading, one continues to hear this exchange: "You're looking great – are you going to a wedding?"/ "Oh God no – I'm coming back from a wake."
