Reading Matters

DublinSwell 2011: Paul Durcan's poetry leaves us reeling in the aisles

There's a fine line between comedy and tragedy, and the poetry of Paul Durcan treads it perfectly.

At DublinSwell last Friday night, wearing black trousers and a bright canary yellow jumper, he regaled us with several poems, each one more hilarious than the last, and I'd barely caught my breath before he was reading us something else.

Poetry, on the page, doesn't usually make sense to me. But hearing it read out loud, by the person who wrote it, was mesmerising.

Durcan has an expressive voice. It rises and falls with emotion, he whispers some lines, croons others, occasionally he shouts. It all adds up to a powerful performance.

Two poems stood out for me. The first, hilariously entitled The Woman Who Kept Her Breasts in the Garden, was, well, hilarious.

The second, Golden Mothers Driving West, started off as a laugh-out-loud comedy, about three elderly woman doing a runner from their nursing home in a stolen car, before it mutated into a poignant, tragic tale about the past, and, finally, death.

I've taken the liberty of reproducing the poem in full below, which I found on The Ireland Chair of Poetry website:

Golden Mothers Driving West, words by Paul Durcan

The inevitable call came from the Alzheimer’s nursing
     home.
Mummy had been sitting there in an armchair for two
     years
In a top-storey room with two other aged ladies,
Deborah O’Donoghue and Maureen Timoney.
Three Irish orang-utans, silent, stationary.
The call was to say that between 3 and 5 a.m.
The three of them had gone missing from the room.
At first it was thought that all three had slipped
Out the window, ajar in the hot, humid night.
But, no, there were no torsos in the flowerbed.
It transpired that a car had also gone missing.
Was it thinkable they had commandeered a car?
At five in the afternoon the police called
To say that a Polish youth in a car wash in Kinnegad
Had washed and hot-waxed a car for three ladies,
All of whom were wearing golden dressing gowns –
Standard issue golden dressing gowns
Worn by all the inmates of the Alzheimer’s nursing
    home.
Why he remembered them was that he was struck
By the fact that all three ladies were laughing
For the ten minutes it took him to wash the car.
‘I am surprised,’ he stated, ‘by laughter.’
At 9 p.m. the car was sighted in Tarmonbarry
On the Roscommon side of the River Shannon,
Parked at the jetty of the Emerald Star marina.
At 9.30 p.m. a female German child was taken
To the police station at Longford by her stepfather.
The eleven-year-old had earlier told her stepfather
In the cabin of their hired six-berth river cruiser
That she had seen three ladies jump from the bridge.
Her stepfather had assumed his daughter imagined it
As she was, he told police, ‘a day-dreamer born’.
The girl repeated her story to the police:
How three small, thin, aged ladies with white hair
Had, all at once, together, jumped from the bridge,
Their dressing gowns flying behind them in the breeze.
What colours were the dressing gowns? she was asked.
‘They are wearing gold,’ she replied.
Wreathed on the weir downstream from the bridge
Police sub-aqua divers retrieved the three bodies,
One of whom, of course, was my own emaciated
    mother,
Whose fingerprints were later found on the wheel of
    the car.
She had been driving west, west to Westport,
Westport on the west coast of Ireland
In the County of Mayo,
Where she had grown up with her mother and sisters
In the War of Independence and the Civil War,
Driving west to Streamstown three miles outside
    Westport,
Where on afternoons in September in 1920,
Ignoring the roadblocks and the assassinations,
They used walk down Sunnyside by the sea’s edge,
The curlews and the oystercatchers,
The upturned black currachs drying out on the stones,
And picnic on the machair grass above the seaweed,
Under the chestnut trees turning autumn gold
And the fuchsia bleeding like troupes of crimson-tutu’d
    ballerinas in the black hedgerows.
Standing over my mother’s carcass in the morgue,
A sheep’s skull on a slab,
A girl in her birth-gown blown across the sand,
I shut my eyes:
Thank you, O golden mother,
For giving me a life,
A spear of rain.
After a long life searching for a little boy who lives
    down the lane
You never found him, but you never gave up;
In your afterlife nightie
You are pirouetting expectantly for the last time.  

I was so taken by Paul Durcan's performance, I bought one of his books (A Snail in My Prime) the next day. He now has the dubious honour of being the author of the very first poetry book added to my personal library.

For further literary events in Ireland, visit the Dublin UNESCO City of Literature website.

I travelled to Dublin and attended this event as a guest of Tourism Ireland.

DublinSwell 2011: Mike Scott interprets W.B. Yeats' epic poems 'September 1913' and 'Let The Earth Bear Witness' in song

As much as I love literature, I have a mental block when it comes to poetry. I simply don't "get it". For that reason I've never bothered to read W.B. Yeats, arguably Ireland's greatest poet.

But at DublinSwell on Friday night the poetry of Yeats was brought to life by Mike Scott, a Edinburgh-born Dublin-based singer songwriter, best known as the founder of The Waterboys in 1984. Scott's influences are steeped in literature and his most recent project has been to create an entire suite of Yeats' poetry set to music.

He performed two of these poems on the night, the first September 1913, which you can view on YouTube below.

 

September 1913 words by W.B. Yeats

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry, 'Some woman's yellow hair
Has maddened every mother's son':
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.

The second was a very profound and incredibly moving rendition of Yeats' Let The Earth Bear Witness, which Scott dedicated to "all the people of the earth struggling for self-determination".

As he performed the song, accompanied by Iona Marshall on guitar, a video from the recent protests in Iran was screened behind him. This powerful imagery took on greater potency when accompanied by Yeats' words, almost as if they had been written for the revolutionary times in which we live. It was an emotional way to end a brilliant evening of words and voices...

 

Let The Earth Bear Witness by W.B. Yeats

They shall be remembered for ever
They shall be alive for ever
They shall be speaking for ever
The people shall hear them for ever

Let the sea bear witness
Let the wind bear witness
Let the earth bear witness
Let the stars bear witness!

For further literary events in Ireland, visit the Dublin UNESCO City of Literature website.

I travelled to Dublin and attended this event as a guest of Tourism Ireland.