Cries Of An Irish Caveman

'[His] voice speaks clearly on the page in poems of harrowing intimacy, politics and love. He holds a mirror up to himself: but we can see ourselves over his shoulder, whoever we are' - Carol Ann Duffy, Guardian

WINNER OF THE 2014 IRISH BOOK LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 
 
Cries of an Irish Caveman is Paul Durcan's most inspired and surprising collection of poems. Through four distinct sections, he brings his tender lyricism to bear on the themes of love and loss, life and death. 
 
The first section describes an experience in Australia which provides a starting point for reassessing his past relationships and loves. The second returns to Ireland, its people and places, the celebrated and the unknown. The third section is a meditation on his daughter's marriage, placing within an historical and sacramental context a very personal event. 
 
And finally, in some of his most daring and original writing, Durcan describes his own twentieth-century romance, replete with ecstacies and inevitable agonies, beauty and hope, but also brutality and self-abasement.

Paul Durcan's Ireland is the one we inhabit. At times he is ready to celebrate the bizarre and the ordinary; at other times he is full of a surreal rage against both order and disorder

For him poetry is story-telling and his stories are told in a direct fashion that makes them totally accessible... Paul Durcan's poetry sings

Durcan's poems contain an essentially empathetic morality. He slips from character to character (a bishop, a milkman, a refugee, a single mother, a roofer), and succeeds in demonstrating how near the foreign can be, and how comic or common the concerns

WINNER OF THE 2014 IRISH BOOK LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 
 
Cries of an Irish Caveman is Paul Durcan's most inspired and surprising collection of poems. Through four distinct sections, he brings his tender lyricism to bear on the themes of love and loss, life and death. 
 
The first section describes an experience in Australia which provides a starting point for reassessing his past relationships and loves. The second returns to Ireland, its people and places, the celebrated and the unknown. The third section is a meditation on his daughter's marriage, placing within an historical and sacramental context a very personal event. 
 
And finally, in some of his most daring and original writing, Durcan describes his own twentieth-century romance, replete with ecstacies and inevitable agonies, beauty and hope, but also brutality and self-abasement.

Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil

A collection of contemporary poetry that throws itself into the discussion of Irish identity in relation to the world.

WINNER OF THE 2014 IRISH BOOK LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 
 
Paul Durcan has been at the heart of Irish cultural life for 30 years and his poetry has acquired a huge international following. Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil is his most challenging and engaging collection yet, one that addresses itself through Ireland and the Irish diaspora to the whole world beyond.

Durcan’s must be the most capacious and generous mind in contemporary poetry: in the face of the rabid and murderous dark he finds always something or someone to celebrate

Paul Durcan’s Ireland is the one we inhabit. At times he is ready to celebrate the bizarre amd the ordinary; at other times he is full of a surreal rage against both order and disorder

WINNER OF THE 2014 IRISH BOOK LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 
 
Paul Durcan has been at the heart of Irish cultural life for over 40 years and his poetry has acquired a huge international following. Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil is his most challenging and engaging collection yet, one that addresses itself through Ireland and the Irish diaspora to the whole world beyond.

O Westport In The Light Of Asia Minor

'Durcan's mastery of tone, his manic confidentiality, his blithe expositions of the seemingly unthinkable, his hypnotic repetitions of what other poets would hardly dare utter once... give an air of audacious authority unique in contemporary poetry' - Brendan Kennelly, Irish Times

WINNER OF THE 2014 IRISH BOOK LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 
 
O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor was first published in a tiny edition in Dublin in 1975. It was Paul Durcan's first fully-fledged collection, and already displays an astonishingly mature, visionary power, shot through with the surrealism and heart-breaking comedy that have since become his hallmark. It won him the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Now Durcan's readers can discover what they have been missing. The poems are printed in the order he originally intended, and the volume concluded with six poems from his very first collaborative collection, Endsville (1967), with Brian Lynch.

Paul Durcan... is one of the country's leading living poets... His strange, mesmerising voice wraps itself around every syllable and texture of his poems, wrapping the audience into its very spell, into the very grain of the text

The voice speaks clearly on the page in poems of harrowing intimacy, politics and love. He holds a mirror up to himself: but we can see ourselves over his shoulder, whoever we are

This is the real thing. One can't say more, or less than that

WINNER OF THE 2014 IRISH BOOK LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 
 
O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor was first published in a tiny edition in Dublin in 1975. It was Paul Durcan's first fully-fledged collection, and already displays an astonishingly mature, visionary power, shot through with the surrealism and heart-breaking comedy that have since become his hallmark. It won him the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Now Durcan's readers can discover what they have been missing. The poems are printed in the order he originally intended, and the volume concluded with six poems from his very first collaborative collection, Endsville (1967), with Brian Lynch.

The Berlin Wall Cafe

WINNER OF THE 2014 IRISH BOOK LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 
 
This was the collection with which Durcan broke through to the huge and appreciative audience he enjoys today. In the first part are poems of great satirical comedy and also of great passion and indignation, and in the second part, poems about the break-up of a marriage so intense they would hurt if they weren't also possessed of the healing gifts of truthfulness and humour. In The Berlin Wall Café Durcan has located that space between the walls and barriers societies and individuals erect - a no-man's-land of the free imagination where we meet as the vulnerable and comical human beings we are. It contains some of his very best work.

The Days of Surprise

The Irish Number 1 bestseller. A new collection from one of Ireland's best, and best-loved, poets.

In The Days of Surprise the reader is continually, refreshingly, entertainingly, disturbingly surprised and, more importantly, nourished

A new Durcan poetry book is always a joy. This one is no exception

Scrupulously paced poems of the life, times and beliefs of this emotionally intense yet intellectually rewarding writer are inscribed touchstones

To have heard him read adds another pleasure to the reading of his work – but the voice speaks clearly on the page in poems of harrowing intimacy, politics and love

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.

The Art Of Life

A magnificent collection from the much-loved Irish poet

An embedded poet catching the strains, hysterical and sad, of contemporary Ireland

Paul Durcan's Ireland is the one we inhabit. At times he is ready to celebrate the bizarre and the ordinary; at other times he is full of surreal rage against both order and disorder

Durcan is a God. He can break your heart in supermarket or petrol station. He is unafraid, masterful and exactly what this world needs more of: wild abandon, wild love and sheer mad genius

The world is all the richer for this man’s verse

Durcan’s voice speaks clearly on the page in poems of harrowing intimacy, politics and love

In The Art of Life Paul Durcan takes us around County Mayo in his "filthy, two-door, bottle-green Opel Astra", stopping off at Westport and Achill Island, where he declares himself to be "globally sad", but "locally glad". Next he travels east to Dublin to hold in his arms his newborn granddaughter and thence to Tuscany, Poland and Japan. Along the way he reflects upon parental pride, the aches and pains of old age, the trim bottoms of snooker players, the wisdom of ex-wives and dogs on Sandymount Strand, while introducing us to a host of colourful characters, including a bishop, a roofer, a milkman, a priest and an unmarried mother. 
 
Is there an art of living or is life a work of art? This magnificent collection – originally published on Paul Durcan's sixtieth birthday – reveals one of Ireland's most successful and popular poets at the height of his powers and continuing to challenge, amuse and delight.

In The Art of Life Paul Durcan takes us around County Mayo in his "filthy, two-door, bottle-green Opel Astra", stopping off at Westport and Achill Island, where he declares himself to be "globally sad", but "locally glad". Next he travels east to Dublin to hold in his arms his newborn granddaughter and thence to Tuscany, Poland and Japan. Along the way he reflects upon parental pride, the aches and pains of old age, the trim bottoms of snooker players, the wisdom of ex-wives and dogs on Sandymount Strand, while introducing us to a host of colourful characters, including a bishop, a roofer, a milkman, a priest and an unmarried mother. 
 
Is there an art of living or is life a work of art? This magnificent collection - originally published on Paul Durcan's sixtieth birthday - reveals one of Ireland's most successful and popular poets at the height of his powers and continuing to challenge, amuse and delight.

The Laughter of Mothers

An outstanding collection of personal poems from one of Ireland's best-loved poets

Risky, complex, full of compassion, Durcan's interrogations of storytelling itself, of the juxtapositions and confluences of personal history and political struggle, are a bristling tour de force

Durcan's importance as a writer, and his uniqueness, are still reassuringly evident

Anyone who has attended one of his electrifying poetry readings and been reduced to hysteria (a common enough occurrence) can testify to the unique flavour of his work

'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.

Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have my Being

A major new collection from one of Ireland's leading poets: moving, funny and wise.

A book filled with contemporary life, but the poems also have a way of evoking enduring human values, in all their odd tones and surprising textures, as much as the contemporary moment

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... These poems are a pleasure to read

A poetry of encounter, of sidelong glances and exuberant strangeness. There will be many pleasures here for Durcan fans and aficionados

Superbly composed, uneasy, desperately witty and often startling… At his best, which he often surpasses in this book, he produces what blue, green and red make when mixed: a pure white light, the noble glow of true praise. In contemporary literature, and not just Irish poetry, Durcan is flying high. Noble may yet become Nobel

One of the few genuinely popular poets of recent decades, a vital presence in Irish culture...entertaining, edgy, and with enough ironic self-awareness to make from such quirky subjects more than superficial reflections on his life and times. Durcan is the recording angel who preserves what could be lost, who brings tidings of change in some of the darker moments of history

He is a prolific poet, and as he nears a venerable three-score years and 10, his prodigious output shows no signs of slowing… There will be many pleasures here for Durcan fans and aficionados

It was mesmerising and spellbinding and deeply affecting each poem received in awed silence

A personal journey through places and people I know

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'.

40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007

Life is a Dream

The bestselling Irish poet's selection from his lifetime's work.

Life is a Dream finally presents the evidence of major artistic achievement in a single, unified text.

The world is all the richer for this man's verse.

Paul Durcan's Ireland is the one we inhabit. At times he is ready to celebrate the bizarre and the ordinary; at other times he is full of a surreal rage against both order and disorder.

To have heard him read adds another pleasure to the reading of his work - but the voice speaks clearly on the page in poems of harrowing intimacy, politics and love

Durcan is a God. He can break your heart in supermarket or petrol station. He is unafraid, masterful and exactly what this world needs more of: wild abandon, wild love and sheer mad genius.

Famous for his electrifying poetry readings, Paul Durcan marks four decades of composing silently and reciting aloud with this magnificent collection, which brings together for the first time the critically acclaimed poet's own choice of his work from his first book, Endsville (1967), to The Laughter of Mothers (2007). Life is a Dream represents the whole range of Durcan's writing - funny and subversive verse narratives and self-mocking poems of underachievement; poems celebrating love and sex or the lives of famous writers and artists; as well as tender, poignant verses commemorating the dead. 
 
Throughout his long career, Durcan has continued to make passionate and moving poetry out of his own and his country's misfortunes. He is by turns a surrealist, a mystic, an Irish comedian with perfect comic timing and an angry champion of the oppressed. Life is a Dream reaffirms the constant vision and artistic integrity of one of the most powerful, humane and original voices in modern poetry.

Snail In My Prime

'The present selection serves to confirm his almost iconic place in contemporary Irish poetry' - Derek Mahon, Irish Times

To have heard him adds another pleasure to the reading of the work- but the voice speaks clearly on the page in poems of harrowing intimacy, politics and love. He holds a mirror up to himself: but we can see ourselves over his shoulder, whoever we are

Durcan's... tall stories, dialogues and choruses, remind us that poetry can have popular reach and embody a genuinely countrywide spirit, without sacrificing integrity

Durcan's mastery of tone, his manic confidentiality, his blithe expositions of the seemingly unthinkable, his hypnotic repetitions of what other poets would hardly dare to utter once, all help to give [his work] an air of audacious authority unique in contemporary poetry

Like all first-class comedians, he is deadly serious

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

A tragicomedy in verse which pits the joys of friendship and humour against the madness and melancholy of the festive season, by the much-celebrated Irish poet, Paul Durcan.

[A]n intimate soul-searching, by turns painful and savagely funny

He is a master of minor tragedies and melancholy, self-mocking humour... It is a beautiful, poignant and wry piece of writing. The firm yet hesitant friendship between these two men is the most genuine note of goodwill you could come across in a whole month of Christmases

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.

Paul Durcan

Niall MacMonagle

Colm Toibin

His is a once-in-a-generation talent. He has written immortal poems. I revere him.

The world is all the richer for this man's verse

Profoundly funny and profoundly moving... a wonderful collection from a national treasure

The work of a singular Irish poet is celebrated in this welcome compendium of classic Durcan poems

"A reminder - and an affirmation - of Paul Durcan's singular contribution not just to Irish poetic culture but the broader world of contemporary poetry" Irish Times 
 
For fifty years the poet Paul Durcan has explored and questioned a world both real and imagined. 
 
Steeped in the goings-on of Ireland and preoccupied with its concerns, he has delighted, enriched and unsettled his readers. His prodigious output of more than twenty collections bursts with poems that are courageously personal and passionately spiritual – a body of work that contains multitudes. 
 
‘The great enemy of art is the ego’ says Durcan. ‘It keeps getting in the way. One needs the ego to disappear so that I become you; I become the people walking up and down the street.’ 
 
First published in 1967, Durcan remains the most of companionable of poets. His vivacity and ability to surprise has never been clearer than in this new selection of eighty of his finest poems, published in celebration of his 80th birthday. 
 
EDITED BY NIALL MACMONAGLE 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY COLM TOIBIN

80 at 80

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Paul Durcan

Praise for 80 at 80

His is a once-in-a-generation talent. He has written immortal poems. I revere him.

To have heard him read adds another pleasure to the reading of his work – but the voice speaks clearly on the page in poems of harrowing intimacy, politics and love

Durcan is a God. He can break your heart in supermarket or petrol station. He is unafraid, masterful and exactly what this world needs more of: wild abandon, wild love and sheer mad genius

His is a once-in-a-generation talent. He has written immortal poems. I revere him.

To have heard him read adds another pleasure to the reading of his work – but the voice speaks clearly on the page in poems of harrowing intimacy, politics and love

Durcan is a God. He can break your heart in supermarket or petrol station. He is unafraid, masterful and exactly what this world needs more of: wild abandon, wild love and sheer mad genius

His is a once-in-a-generation talent. He has written immortal poems. I revere him.

To have heard him read adds another pleasure to the reading of his work – but the voice speaks clearly on the page in poems of harrowing intimacy, politics and love

Durcan is a God. He can break your heart in supermarket or petrol station. He is unafraid, masterful and exactly what this world needs more of: wild abandon, wild love and sheer mad genius

Books by Paul Durcan

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