Paul Durcan In The Green Room

Taken at The Mountains to the Sea Festival in 2015. Durcan is one of  the few Irish poets who can enter directly into outraged political debate or deeply personal family upheavals. One of my favourite lines, from a poem about his separation/divorce: 'The most subversive unit in the world is the human family.'

You could call this risky and perhaps it is, though the 'risk' word is so often abused, in blurbs, etc., that it has lost much of its punch. Better to say that the best of his poems are arresting and passionate, and have an immediacy often lacking in contemporary (or any) poetry. They are also often seriously (and I mean seriously) funny, full of wildly surreal humour. 

The titles of his poems and collections often proclaim this: 'Hymn to a Broken Marriage', 'The Day Margaret Thatcher Joined the IRA', 'The Berlin Wall Cáfe'. 

His early poem, 'Making Love Outside Áras an Uachtaráin', is a good example.