Poetry/The Art of Life By Paul Durcan: Though Durcan writes about 'old life', new life is evident in his latest exuberant collection
The Art of Life is a wonderful book for the autumn of the year, the spirit or the life. The whole collection sings the knowledge that autumn makes the spring. "I fling up into the darkening sky/ The pancakes of my soul", says Durcan in 'Asylum Seeker', and in this grounded and exhuberant book, Paul Durcan flings his arms wider than ever before to offer the asylum to hope that is so grudgingly sought by this nation and this time.
In a score of books since the late 1960s, Paul Durcan has been concerned with the damage done to Ireland and the Western world by a prevailing scepticism and fear of free human nature. Ironically, Durcan's impassioned poetry has displayed a related doubt about the potential for good in the natures of those he holds to account for such negativity. Durcan has become an essential voice because his work has steadily nudged both scepticisms - the one he attacks and the one he embodies - closer towards an attitude of faith.
The faith Durcan celebrates no longer takes the form of the besieged and isolated idealism of the enlightened who take up single moral combat against the forces of complacent, self-serving authoritarianism. Instead it appears as the resolute and joyful leap of faith of ordinary men and women who, in the face of the disintegration of their world, reconstruct its basic elements by getting on with the engrossing business of living in the open space of the moment. This book proclaims that such a leap of faith remains in the power of every person and culture "facing extinction": "In the face of grief we put our best foot forward, crimson and/ gold in the face of grief." ('Aldeburgh October Storm').
In The Art of Life, although the claims of suffering are never denied, pleasure is far more important. Its occasion may be the understated love between an older couple, or a man's smile of detachment at "the Amusement Arcade" of his own ageing body as "the small pink balls of pain/ Trip on lights all over". Pleasure in The Art of Life is found in traditional religious practice or in any kind of willing and clear-sighted adherence to systems that bring people into communion: witness the litanies to homes and gardens and families littering this collection. The book is brimful of complex occasions of uncomplicated pleasure, tenderly explored, tenaciously offered.
Increasingly in his poetry, Durcan refuses the mortar of blame and guilt as he builds a vision of change. This book, so consciously tuned to a wavelength of upbeat and steadfast courage in the face of affliction, sharply condemns the "self-pity and hysteria and self-/ righteousness and penny-pinching and nostalgia" of the politically correct ('Report to Rezzori'). Beyond one's political affiliation, "only men of no party . . . know how to light/ a fire from the ashes of the night.". Durcan himself is a Nationalist, Unionist, Catholic, Protestant heathen believer who frees those deathlike absolute nouns of Irish identity back into the active connective flow of their use as verbal adjectives. He shows that to be national-ist, union-ist, protest-ant and capaciously catholic all at once, is to clear the ground for the "soul in spate" that carries before it the wastelands of the human spirit.
The comic spirit that has sustained Durcan from the beginning, turned dark in his elegiac 2001 collection, Cries of an Irish Caveman. That book focused on the stripped and drowning ego of the isolated male tasting "the Eucharist of the nothingness of life". In this latest collection, the swarming "everythingness" of life flows back to occupy that scoured space. Now, "Although I am globally sad I am locally glad/ To be about to drive down that corkscrew road." ('The Far Side of the Island'). Now, he knows himself "not afraid in the night/ To be a back-seat passenger in a white Honda Civic/ Or to be alone in water at my life's conclusion.", because "In this same bathtub many have soaked/ And all were chosen." ('Santa Maddalena').
In the opening poem of The Art of Life, Durcan declares himself to be a middle-aged male who is 19 years pregnant with the "Golden Island" of the Ireland he wants to bring into being. He must have conceived, therefore, in the mid-1980s - a period many consider a nadir of patriarchal social regression in recent history, here and elsewhere. Out of such dark is born the present volume, which revisits and injects light into some of his most famous and bitterly-tinged satires from that time. The Man with a Bit of Jizz in Him redeems the insensible haulier whose wife met Jesus on the road near Moone; the family-man roofer Seamus Walsh displaces for good the precious Raymond of the Rooftops, and the creatively individual Carnalurgan Milkman relieves at last the hallowed vigil of the Kilfenora Teaboy.
Throughout this book, new life is evident the more Durcan focuses on old life, be it of the body or the body politic. The strongest resistance to despair comes from unlikely sources inside the system, bearers of the clichés of tradition and backwardness: the aged, the religious, the family male, the military. To these are given the songs of a people solidly in place, who acknowledge the cold but who cannot understand those who refuse the available warmth. In availing of that warmth, these poems generate it. In the voice of 'A Robin in Autumn Chatting at Dawn' returning from his visit to the precipice:
With my hands behind my back and my best breast out,
My telescope folded up in my wings, my tricorn gleaming,
I emerge on the bridge of my fuchsia, whistling:
All hands on deck! Hy Brasil, ho!
Catriona Clutterbuck lectures in the Department of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at UCD
The Art of Life By Paul Durcan The Harvill Press, 118pp. £12