Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil By Paul Durcan Harvill Press 257 pp, 14.99 in UK
Paul Durcan's poetry attracts extreme responses. Witness the packed-out readings, his iconic presence at home, the growing enthusiasm abroad. And also witness those who can't take his work at all. As someone who can take a good deal of it - and Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil runs to 100 poems - I feel that the argument hinges on genre. If you always want densely-textured lyric or honed epiphany or mille-feuilles allusiveness, you are in the wrong shop. This is not to say that Durcan can't produce both lyric and epigram. "Ashplant, New Year's Eve, 1966", for example, adds to his store of gnomic couplets: "Year in, year out, I tramp Sandymount Strand./ Is there no one to talk to in Ireland?"
Yet, partly because he is so intent on talking to Ireland, Durcan aims at Whitman-esque saturation rather than distillation. His structures encompass narrative, drama, monologue, commentary, polemic. This book is really a long poem, an epic interior journey bulging with characters and conversations. For instance, the title-poem, which begins with a promise of leisurely unfolding ("On the Friday night before the last Sunday in September"), takes us from Achill Island to Westport, to mass, to a restaurant, to the All Ireland Football Final on television, and back to "the German soldier's cottage/On the side of the big mountain/Between the mountain stream and the roadside fuchsia".
Sometimes we travel with "Father Patrick O'Brien, CC", sometimes with a chance-met, suffering woman compared to the "batlike soul" in Portrait of the Artist. This narrative also invokes the McQuaid years, "old friends; Tony O'Malley, Brendan Kennelly, John Moriarty", and the RTE commentator who sends "greetings to you all from Djakarta down to Crossmolina" and "to our friends in Brazil". The poem ends with a prayer for global humanity: "Each to their cardboard in the doorway,/ Each to their roost in the ashram,/ Each to their cabin on the mountain".
Why Brazil? As the echo of previous Durcan titles (like Going Home to Russia) signals, Greetings again seeks to disturb and defamiliarise that homogeneous Ireland where "Not only do Limericks marry Limericks,/Corks Corks . . . But Ringsenders marry Ringsenders". Some may think - in my view, wrongly - that heterogeneity is now so advanced that Durcan should button his lip. Indeed the mellower, even redemptive, tone of this book does imply progress in the direction his vision desires. One poem explicitly celebrates "The Mary Robinson Years". Another revises an earlier title to "Making love inside Aras an Uachtarain (his italics, no scandal). When Father O'Brien says mass without "power-tripping or patronage", the McQuaid shadow has gone. Poet and priest are reconciled.
But shadows remain; nor was it ever Durcan's project to betray his own crowd. Rather, he has profoundly internalised the historical culture of Catholic/Nationalist Ireland. His satire and his symbolism irradiate that culture with alternative possibilities. When acting as counter-cultural priest-politician Durcan keeps the Shelleyan faith in the poet as unacknowledged legislator - even the Yeatsian faith that Ireland's acknowledged legislators should step aside. Wars "make nothing happen", whereas "reality is poetry, poetry reality" - although he laughs at himself in "Holy Smoke": "The problem of being a poet/Is the problem of being always right". This book's numerous poems about poets include a delightful sequence on Kavanagh and another of Durcan's subtle dialogues with Seamus Heaney: a sub-genre I construe as a negotiation of their different legislative claims.
Greetings may, now and then, exclude people outside the obsessive Catholic/Nationalist family romance. It may puzzle people who don't read the Republic's newspapers, know the Irish literary world, or share Durcan's heroes, heroines and villains. He must realise that many will not think him "right" about Charles Haughey, Francis Stuart, Princess Diana, Gerry Adams and others. At boiling point, he can sacrifice complexity for hagiography or demonology, for mantras or slogans. Nonetheless, Durcan takes the poetry of the "Irish nation" into new politics, pacifist politics. He buries Republican and Loyalist violence in the same unequivocal grave. Greetings contains elegies for Omagh, the Quinn brothers, the Poyntzpass murders, "The Shankill Road Massacre", "The Bloomsday Murders".
Durcan's protest-elegies speak with empathy, with furious irony. They speak from a Zen-like still centre, from the end of the poet's tether. "Omagh" includes three "litanies" which simply list the victims' names, their ages, their home towns ("Omagh" itself appears 15 times), and its conclusion is the barest anti-elegiac statement: "I cannot forgive you". The Poyntzpass poem takes shape as a poignant ghostly "conversation under two cars" between the Catholic and Protestant victims of a Loyalist assassin. Another poem sums up the deepest politics of Durcan's poetry: "If only John, Bill, Gerry, Ian, David would stop roaring . . . What use is a minute's silence? No use./Let gales peter out into massed snowdrops."
In Greetings Durcan's familiar and unfamiliar worlds converge. It has become harder to say where figures like the obsessive doorknocker-polisher "Tinkerly Luxemburgo" ("If you have to be lonely, be lonely in style") end, and figures like "Seamus Heaney" begin. This retrospective, overtly autobiographical work brings "Paul Durcan" more upfront as a character, too, especially in some tender meditations on middle-aged love. Despite occasional linguistic looseness, occasional self-parody and manneristic excess, Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil is intricately wrought: an intense summation of what Durcan has to say about community, art and their interdependence. He is one of the few contemporary poets who make poetry matter.
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