Christmas Day - Hardcover

Paul Durcan is one of Ireland's foremost poets. He was born in Dublin in 1944. His first book, Endsville (1967), has been followed by more than twenty others, including The Berlin Wall Cafe (a Poetry Book Society Choice in 1985), Daddy, Daddy (winner of the Whitbread Award for Poetry in 1990), A Snail in My Prime: New and Selected Poems (1993), Cries of an Irish Caveman: New Poems (2001), The Art of Life (2004) and The Laughter of Mothers (2008). In 2009 he published a selection of his work from the previous forty years in one volume, Life is a Dream. In 2001 Paul Durcan received a Cholmondeley Award. He was the Ireland Professor of Poetry 2004-2007. In 2009 he was conferred with an honorary degree by Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of Aosdana.

The irrepressible Durcan is up to his tricks again. The 52-year-old Dubliner maintains a reputation as Ireland's most popular and entertaining poet (he famously compared "his love" to a pint of stout) and yet is taken seriously by the Irish literary community as a poet extending the Celtic bardic tradition of the public balladeer. In this booklength poem, Durcan tells of a Christmas Day shared by two Irish bachelors, Paul and Frank: they bring each other gifts; they do not go to Mass; they have a meal; they sing a song or two-all the while reminiscing about old cemeteries, old loves ("Motoring down to Wesport/ And calling in on Mary McBride/ In the Old Rectory/ And taking the kids out for a spin/ All five of them") and the fate of being a poet ("Two men of no property/ Do men rate/ Who have no real estate?"). Durcan can't help but amuse, and yet here, as throughout most of his work, there is the whiff of gratifying guilt, a sense that Durcan finds a certain malicious pleasure in punishing himself with humor, knowing he deserves worse. It's a peculiar Irishness, perhaps, that permeates Durcan's poems, and may be the secret to his popularity. Still, one might question the poet's evocation of a five-year affair with a nun, which might shock the unsuspecting gift buyer ("All she was interested in/ Was making love," he wryly complains). But priests enough wander in and out of this bawdy, blarney tale to suggest that confession is being heard and sins, perhaps, will be absolved. (Dec.) FYI: Durcan's poem "The Goose in the Frost," written in tribute to Seamus Heaney's winning the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, will appear at the end of this volume.
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