Running through the work of the poet Paul Durcan, who has died aged 80, was a strong ironic engagement with contemporary Irish mores and manners, and much else besides. With his first full-length collection, O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor (1975), Durcan showed himself to be a poet of many gifts, and a complete original. He resembled no one else. His poetry is oblique, exhilarating, unsettling and diverting all at once, and never hesitated to take off into a realm of the surreal.
The 22 collections that followed Westport between 1978 and 2016 are a testimony to the poet’s inventive powers and his distinctive style, and established him among his contemporaries as a force for enlightenment, an artful riddler and rhymer, or the joker in the pack.
Among the outstanding collections are Sam’s Cross (1978), Going Home to Russia (1987) and A Snail in My Prime (1993); but certain key poems scattered throughout his body of work continue to make an impact. Six Nuns Die in Convent Inferno, for example, The Beckett at the Gate, Going Home to Russia, and Making Love Outside Áras an Uachtaráin (which cocks a snook at De Valera’s Ireland with its pieties and prohibitions).
Some are filled with erotic affirmation (Teresa’s Bar), or are geared to repudiate misogyny, cruelty, bigotry and so on. The Troubles get a showing, with poems such as the beautiful and mysterious Riding School illuminating the conflict. And some of his poems are simply caustically hilarious: What Shall I Wear, Darling, to the Great Hunger? Incidentally, at one point he pokes amiable fun at the poetry reading (tedious, boring) – but his own readings brought him additional acclaim, with audiences mesmerised by the hypnotic timbre of his voice.
The route by which anyone becomes a poet is a mystery, and with Durcan it is even more so. His talent was seemingly not inherited from any of his relatives, and before it burst into full bloom, the young Paul had a number of traumas to overcome, despite – or perhaps because of – being born into a Dublin family of legal high-flyers.
His father, John Durcan, was a barrister and circuit court judge. His mother, Sheila (nee MacBride), had practised as a solicitor before marriage. Both his younger siblings became solicitors in due course, and it was expected that Paul would do likewise. He was educated at a Jesuit school, Gonzaga college, in the Dublin suburb of Ranelagh, and went on to University College Dublin to study, among other things, economics. But he never completed his degree.
One of Durcan’s characteristic practices is to start a poem by concocting an imaginary newspaper headline, or parodying an actual one, such as Cardinal Dies of Heart Attack in Dublin Brothel, for instance. By a singular irony, a comparable headline in the Irish Independent in 2007 alluded to an actual incident in Durcan’s own past. Kidnapped by his Family and Put in a Mental Home, it read, referring to a time when things had turned dark for the 19-year-old student. Largely at the instigation of his father, Paul was forcibly removed to a psychiatric hospital in south Dublin, where he received a diagnosis of clinical depression.
Worse was to follow: transferred to an asylum near Epsom, in Surrey, he underwent 27 crippling rounds of electroconvulsive therapy. (Durcan always maintained that whatever mental health problems he encountered throughout his life were created, not alleviated, by this awful treatment.)
After it was over he returned to Dublin, chastened but not annihilated. He began to enjoy the company of fellow poets, including Michael Hartnett, Anthony Cronin and Derek Mahon, and became something of a protege of the normally aloof Patrick Kavanagh, in whose company at a wedding reception he met Nessa O’Neill. They married in 1969, and she remained an inspiration, a friend and an object of adulation for the rest of his life – even after the pair separated in 1984.
They lived for a while in London, where Durcan worked for the gas board, and spent time studying paintings in the Tate gallery (painting was a lasting obsession – in 1991 he brought out a collection of poems about paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland, Crazy About Women). There was also an interlude in Barcelona, and a longer sojourn in Cork, from 1970, where Durcan took a degree in archaeology and medieval history at the university, and wrote a column for the Cork Examiner, while Nessa taught in a prison. But poetry, and life in Dublin, remained his principal resources.
From the mid-1970s on, both his literary reputation and his idiosyncratic modus operandi were building up. He wrote extensively about his complicated relationship with his father. In the poem The Company of the White Drinking Cauldrons, from his collection Daddy, Daddy (which won the Whitbread award in 1990), Durcan wrote:
I was the only creature in the world Daddy trusted,
Which is why in later years he conspired to murder me.
From a couple of poems, Going Home to Mayo, Winter 1949, and Crinkle, Near Birr, you get the essence of the story – one minute idyllic, in the former:
… And in the evenings
I walked with my father in the high grass down by the river …
And then a sour note entering in the latter, with the father calling his son a sissy and urging him to be a man. Then the beatings start – but in the end, a kind of reconciliation is effected. “Estranged as we were,” he recalled in Hymn to My Father (1987), “I am glad that it was in this life, / That I loved you.”
It is significant that Mayo is the place where father and son are most vividly in accord in his work. Both of Durcan’s parents were Mayo-born, and he remembers his paternal grandmother’s house, “all oil-lamps and women, / And my bedroom over the public bar below”.
His mother was a niece of Maj John MacBride, who married Maud Gonne and was executed by the British in 1916 for his part in the Easter Rising. Durcan acknowledged his ancestral ties, but resisted the lure of ultra-nationalism. Parodying the 1916 visionaries’ prescription for the country – “Not only free but Gaelic as well, / Not only Gaelic but free as well” – in the two-line poem At the Grave of O’Donovan Rossa (1989), he states:
Not Irish merely but English as well;
Not English merely but Irish as well.
Durcan was the recipient of many honours and accolades, including a lifetime achievement award at the 2014 Irish book awards. He was elected a member of the Irish artists association Aosdána, and was Ireland professor of poetry from 2004 to 2007. A selection of his poems, edited by Edna Longley, was published in 1982, and in 1996 Colm Tóibín edited a collection of essays on the Durcan oeuvre, called The Kilfenora Teaboy.
In his last years, Durcan suffered from ill health, but he never relinquished his spirit or his formidable wit. Like his mother, Sheila – as he reported in 2003 in his prose collection Paul Durcan’s Diary – he “always had the keenest sense of the black joke of life”.
He is survived by his daughters with Nessa, Sarah and Síabhra, by his son, Michael, from another relationship, and by nine grandchildren.
.• Paul Durcan, poet, born 16 October 1944; died 17 May 2025
• This article was amended on 28 May 2025. At University College Dublin, Paul Durcan studied economics, and not theology.
