HARVILL Press has done the right thing by Paul Durcan Since they published, in association with Belfast's Blackstaff Press, a marvellous edition of Durcan's new and selected poems, A Snail in My Prime (1993), it is just that Harvill should follow up last year with the re publication, in fine paperbacks, of Durcan's first solo volume, O Westport in the Light Of Asia Minor (1975), his first critically popular volume, The Berlin Wall Cafe (1985), and now this beautifully produced new volume, Christmas Day.
When Durcan came to a wider audience, he had behind him almost twenty years of writing poems, publishing in often out of the way places and maintaining a strict focus on the business to hand making poems work. The dedication to his art, far from any public gaze, has paid off handsomely with the fully achieved and justified reputation of a poetry buying public and larger audiences beyond - in Ireland, Britain and further afield.
Durcan attacked the borders of a cosy, comfort blanketed literary scene with evangelical rigour and razor sharp satire. He captures in poem after poem the source of so much that is special about Irish life - what doesn't get said, the cracks which open up behind and around ordinary speech - and in his monologues he presents the world with an identity parade of the curious, strained and unbelievable faces of everyday life.
Some find all this too rhetorical and under achieved in form. For this reader, Durcan's poems are absolutely convincing and break like a tidal wave upon the stony grey soil of so much of contemporary writing in English. We are all in his debt.
And the litany of Christmas Day recites itself with numerous cross references to the rites and rituals of life in Ireland. The names of writers tumble around with song titles, book titles, radio programmes, names of actors, plaques and inscriptions, brand names, voices of this one and that, newspaper headlines, and the pantomimic set piece, too. You name it:
What amazes me this Christ mas
Is all the menorahs.
Menorahs are all the craze.
Every second window in
Ringsend
Has a menorah. Oh, Sharon,
Your menorah is only gorgeous.
Don't be talking, Deborah.
It is as if Stephen Dedalus awoke from decades of slumber, threw on a black leather jacket, wrapped a red scarf (from Kevin and Howlin's) around his neck and stepped out from the covers of Joyce's A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. He meets up with one of those student pals and on Christmas Day rambles to Ringsend and in and out of his own mind.
The conversation of this particular homecoming, never grotesque, is distinctly believable and bizarre; James Joyce has a bearing (barely), predicated upon the Portrait's Christmas Day dinner scene of marvelling self consciousness:
Poetry's another word
For losing everything
Except purity of heart.
In my mobile home on the hill
I'd hang my aerial out of the beech tree
And fill up my breeze blocks
And my rubber tyres
With sunflowers and gnomes,
Gladioli and foxgloves,
And be a martyr to
Sunday mornings in bed,
Swinging from pits of loneliness to wells of fellow feeling, Durcan's Christmas Day is not simply a seasonal song of self but a trip through our own time, in this place. For good measure, Durcan adds an encomium to Seamus Heaney in Stockholm, December 1995, "A Goose in the Frost" which is a kind of snapshot: "The end of poetry is innocence:/A child in the sun;/One who knows how to take his time." Yes.