To start with an unlikely comparison: Paul Durcan's basic style has something in common with the prose narratives of Samuel Beckett - a kind of blithe, colloquial garrulity. The humour is up-front; with Beckett, the challenge then is to see what (if anything) lies behind it, in the way of philosophy or a message for the times. This problem in Durcan's case has generally been more acute; occasionally his work attains sudden and powerful compassion (as in Jesus, break his fall), but often the reader has to go with the facetious verbal flow.
On the last page of Cries of an Irish Caveman, there appears the following "mantra":
O let there be an end to politically-correct, sectarian,
nouveau-riche, low-skies-infested Ireland!
How is the irony working here, if it is? People who complain about political correctness can be of dubious correctness themselves, so the apparent pharisaism of this induces some anxiety. It is the culmination of the last of the book's four sections, the one that provides the title and in the course of which the narrative voice as cow (or occasionally ox) laments his rejection by Cita, a member of the middle-class Tipperary farming sisterhood. This improbable scenario is presumably what makes the blurb claim that this is "Durcan's most inspired and surprising collection of poems". The first self-mocking section is 'Give Him Bondi', a single poem, describing the humiliation of the ageing poet with his white and spindly legs among the beauties of Bondi Beach: Durcan at his most ruefully entertaining.
The second section, 'Sonia and Donal and Tracey and Patrick', centres on Irish figures "celebrated and unknown" according to the jacket-note (Sonia is presumably Sonia O'Sullivan; Donal is Donal McCann, mourned by his friends; Tracey is Tracey Emin whose infamous bed is compared to the persona's own, somewhat predictably, but in the terms of 'The Waste Land', less predictably; and Patrick is "the legendary Dr Patrick Nugent GP, who died 6 October 1999" - many of the poems in this section are dutifully dated for some reason. The third section is 'Early Christian Ireland Wedding Cry', a wonderful and whimsical epithalamium for the poet's daughter Sarah which shows Durcan at his most sympathetic, in the spirit of his kindly 'Christmas Day'.
Throughout these first three sections, Durcan's traditional jokes are on display: the exposure of the sexual innocence of the old style Irish male in 'Auntie Gerry's Favourite Married Nephew Seamus', an attitude, though, which I suspect takes us back to the era of Durcan and me. The man driving home to Athlone with a male companion is offered sex by the woman who was hitching a lift, but is reassured by the poem's narrator: Wasn't he lucky that he wasn't alone?
That he had the other man with him?
This is the confiding, accurate, likeable voice of the early Durcan parables. A less successful cameo revival is the "yellow Volks" in 'The Bunnacurry Scurry' - a poem which reads rather tired by now. Lurking delightfully under the Christian Wedding Cry is the Irish proverb "mβ ph≤sann t· bean an tslΘibhe, p≤sann t· an sliabh", but the poem rejoices in the connection "to the marriage place - to the mountain/And to the lake". And Durcan still has the power to unsettle, by setting serious references in a chatty context: the horrors of Rwanda in 'The Black Cow of the Family': "in their billions -/Tutsis and Hutus -/ Cavorting in dissonance". The Taliban appear, hot off the press.
And so to the Caveman himself, whose "bovinity" (in the title of one of the poems) self-laceratingly describes the failure of his Joycean "clownish lusts". At its best this section straddles the Irish eras, from the ball alley "dissolved into desuetude" to now; but mostly it is a curiously effective elegy for 'The Girl from Golden' and 'the Days before Milking Parlours and Mobile Phones'. There is, though, something uneasily reductive about the persona as south-Tipperary cow which doesn't entirely escape the charge of mawkishness under cover of self-accusation. And it is not so much surprising as whimsical. All of which is to say that this is an extreme version of the usual Durcan mix, infuriating and haunting by turns. Every reader has to be left on their own with him; and nobody is bored.
Bernard O'Donoghue is the current director of the Yeats Summer School in Sligo