`It's the body speaking'

The problem, really, is where to begin. Obviously not with a cliche - pretty grim, to begin a piece about a poet with a cliche - but on the other hand, how else to describe a conversation with Paul Durcan, other than as a roller-coaster ride, one which swoops from a) the distinction drawn by Patrick Kavanagh between the parochial and the provincial, to b) everyday life in Jerusalem during the intifada, to c) the biography of Muhammad Ali; touches gently on the difficulties of winters on Achill Island, hurtles into areas of vitriol and pain, pauses, circles, pulls up for entire, heart-stopping moments before the craggy features arrange themselves into a wicked grin and he's off on another anarchic tangent, fuelled by a poet's obsessive search for the right word and a child's disregard for formalities and finished sentences?

But we have to begin somewhere - so let's begin with his new book, a collection of 100 poems wrapped in a silky reproduction of a specially-commissioned Alice Maher drawing of a love-knot and entitled Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil. The outlandish-ness of the latter, even for a poet whose titles have, in the past, included The Haulier's Wife meets Jesus On The Road Near Moone and Kierkegaard's Morning Walk in Copenhagen, is striking. It turns out to be a quotation from Micheal O Muircheartaigh's radio commentary on 1997's All-Ireland football final between Mayo and Kerry. A real quotation? "Oh, yes, that's word for word what he said. `We send greetings to you all from Djakarta down to Crossmolina'. To myself I called the book `The Nineties' or `The Mary Robinson Years', but in the end I felt that was too much of a tag. I've never met Micheal O Muircheartaigh, but for me there's something truly cosmopolitan about when he's talking about hurling players from Clare or wherever - and as a title it has resonances of friendship as well, though obviously that's up to the reader."

A typical Durcan juxtaposition, then; but the Brazilian theme is continued in poems about a children's project run by an Irish priest in Recife, a wheelbarrow maker in Copacabana and a Brazilian footballer who loses first his blue raincoat, then his red-and-white umbrella. The book soon shifts back to contemporary Ireland, moving through such familiar Durcan territory as the difficulty of love, such latter-day phenomena as visiting hen parties; from light-as-a-feather scrutiny of the "routine miracle" of the airport baggage carousel to full-frontal examination of the anger and misery caused by the Omagh bombing. But why does it begin in Brazil? And what's this - praise for the work of Irish religious in South America? Is the man who wrote Archbishop of Kerry To Have Abortion getting dangerously mellow? "I went to Brazil in 1975 under the auspices of the British Council for a month's tour, a series of readings," Durcan explains. "In one place I read there had never been a poetry reading, ever. People came out of curiosity, and it was a very strange experience for all concerned. On that occasion, particularly, I felt I was really from another planet. It's such an exciting place, Brazil - you'll never see such beautiful women walking down the street - anyway, I met a lot of nuns and priests there, almost all Irish, and to me they were heroes and heroines of the kind people sang and talked about in the 1960s. Although, I got the feeling the Pope has, for some reason I just can't figure out, alienated vast masses of people in South America - some of them outstanding theologians whom you'd think, even out of cold Realpolitik, the Church would wish to keep - the brightest and the best. One of the things that astonished me was that there are so many Presbyterians there. An awful lot of people have left the Catholic Church, and Presbyterianism is a much more radical choice for younger people."

Hence the poem Brazilian Presbyterian, in which a young man, questioned about the nature of heaven, caresses the wheel of his Space Wagon as he replies: "Heaven . . . is a place . . . /That . . . would surprise you." And the footballer? "For me pure relaxation, to be honest, is watching a really good soccer match. I went to a Jesuit school and played rugby, and I loved the French rugby teams that came in the 1960s and 1970s. But rugby today is loathsome; there's something truly awful about watching them all digging and clawing at each other. And as for that international match at Lansdowne Road two weeks ago, it was like a poem in action" - he delivers the line as if he were, indeed, giving one of his famed readings - "Painting the grass for money, the sight of Keith Woods and that beautiful bald head of his, lifting himself up with a blue head. In the book I quote what Ger Loughnane said about hurling - pure inspiration, pure technique - he could equally have been speaking of some of the Brazilian soccer teams I've seen over the years. It's beautiful. It's the body speaking." It may be significant that the man who has become, over a 30-year career which began in the late 1960s and was crowned with the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 1990, a kind of unofficial Irish poet laureate, is nowadays less preoccupied with bodies yelling about such issues as abortion and divorce than with the finer points of the beautiful game.

But if the Ireland of the 1990s is a place where a sports fan can move, in one seamless sentence, from hurling to soccer via rugby, the Durcan of Greetings to Our friends in Brazil is acutely, if unsentimentally, conscious of the forces which have combined to shape his vision of the world. Born in the Stella Maris nursing home in Earlsfort Terrace in 1944, he divided his childhood between his parents' home in Dartmouth Square, the pub owned by a maternal aunt in Turlough, Co Mayo and his grandmother's house in Westport. "I was fostered, for want of a better word, to my aunt and my grandmother and my earliest memories are actually of those places, though Dartmouth Square was officially home. So in a funny way I'm neither one thing nor the other, Dublin nor Mayo. My parents - my father, in particular - never became Dubliners, really. Now, I live most of my life in Dublin; I love Achill, but I'm under no illusions as to my ability to last a winter there, I know what a hard battle it is to live there, the winds and the low grey skies, it's a killer." Another layer of consciousness was added by his sojourns in London, where he worked off and on between the ages of 19 and 27.

"I get angry when people start slagging England because, looking back, living in Ireland in those days was like being behind a sort of Iron Curtain - the pressure, the claustrophobia, the rigid conformity. The only way out was to get on the boat to England - and the other important thing was, that it was the only place you could get work. And in general - yes, I know there were signs saying no blacks or Irish - but in general, English people were the friendliest in the world. That was where I got married and where my children were born. So when I go to London it's a bit like going home, too - though, mind you, I'm always glad I'm coming back."

In 1970, Durcan settled in Cork with his first wife, Nessa, and their two young children, and studied for a degree in archaeology and medieval history at University College, Cork. In 1974 he won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, which enabled him to bring out his first solo collection, O Westport In The Light Of Asia Minor - his first published book having been a joint publication with Brian Lynch, Endsville, in 1967. From the beginning, his poetry was highly distinctive, its conversational style and quirky subject matter marking it out from the traditional Irish lyric musings. Current events, religion, contemporary social problems - all found their way into his writing, and as the years went by, he emerged as a relentless critic of establishment folly and a shrewd observer of political posturings.

Now that he is himself a public figure, does he feel it is incumbent on him to make public statements through his poetry? Does he feel he has, somehow, a duty to speak out - or cry out, as he does in the poem Omagh, a dazed litany of the dead juxtaposed with concerns over postal deliveries and rubbish collection? "I don't feel it at all. It doesn't work like that. It's just that when somebody is murdered, the only way I can deal with it or try to cope or respond is by writing a poem. People accuse you of this and that; for example, they say things like `why is it nearly always the IRA that you react against?' When I was a boy, the IRA were heroes, and when I was in London there were a lot of quite genuine civil rights people mixed up in the republican movement and I had an unquestioningly romantic attitude to it all. It was only when I got back to Cork I realised that what was happening was absolute savagery for which there was no justification on any grounds. The IRA claims to represent my tribe, my family, my people. I was born in a Catholic basket - though I loathe these labels - so every time they behave savagely, it's . . . you see, I don't care what the others do - no, it's not that I don't care, but you know what I mean. In the end what counts is what we do."

From the bad guys to the good guy, and his focus on what the last poem in the collection calls The Mary Robinson Years. Noted neither for her sense of humour nor for wearing her heart on her sleeve, is she something of an unlikely heroine for an emotional poet? "Those final poems are a tribute to her seven years," says Durcan, "but they're not entirely uncritical - at least, not to me they aren't.

"When she announced her candidacy, nobody gave her a chance; all the pundits said not a hope. And then when she was elected the cynics said she could never have any effect on anything, she could never change any thing. I don't think Mary Robinson was Joan of Arc, but when you think of some of the things she did - I remember seeing her on television that time in Somalia and you could see she was annoyed with herself for letting her guard down, for weeping the way she did. But for anyone who saw that, outside of Ireland - well, of course it was a drop in the ocean, but it's better than no drop in the ocean. Everything changes, and years went by, and once you detach her from the excitement of her time and place she's an easy target for criticism, especially in hindsight. But the book is meant to capture the way things were then."

Everything changes - even, perhaps, the acerbic Durcan style? Still angry, still playful, but there are other notes in this new book too, and a new kind of bemused calm, especially with regard to love and related matters. "I believe that in a lot of the pieces in this book I have been more specific, that I have got nearer to finding the right word. Not in every single instance. But I couldn't have done a book of that length 20 years ago, and I ascribe that - well, partly to the business of writing every other day, but also to reading other people. Writers like Don DeLillo or Richard Ford, they get every word right. I'm rereading Underworld at the moment, and I dwell on each sentence - which means I don't get very far, but at least it's a great pleasure to see what the standards are, or the scale of the thing. This writing seems to me to be more poetic than much of what is published now as `verse' - and I feel that if you can aim for that, well, you can't do better."

Paul Durcan will be reading from Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil at Andrew's Lane Theatre, Dublin on February 28th; School of Music, University Square, Belfast on March 3rd; Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick on March 4th; Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, on March 5th and Town Hall Theatre, Galway on March 11th