Paul Durcan

Paul Durcan (born October 16, 1944, Dublin, Ireland—died May 17, 2025, Dublin) was an Irish poet whose work displays a desire to surprise the reader by resorting to surrealist eccentricity. His collection Daddy, Daddy (1990) was awarded the Whitbread Book Award for poetry.

Durcan studied archaeology and medieval history at University College Cork. Although he described himself as a devout follower of the Christian faith (evidenced in poems such as “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” [1999]), his early poems show him satirizing the rigidity of doctrine. Such poems as “Archbishop of Kerry to Have Abortion,” from The Berlin Wall Café (1985), also illustrate Durcan’s often zany approach to such topical issues as equality between the sexes.

Durcan’s Daddy, Daddy (1990) was awarded the Whitbread Book Award for poetry. The collection comprises a series of elegiac and counter-elegiac poems for his father. Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (1999) contains some of his most audacious poetry; “Meeting the President” is a strikingly original, dreamlike account of paternal dominance. Durcan’s subsequent elegiac poetry, in collections such as The Laughter of Mothers (2007), recalls his mother’s past in a less-conflicted fashion. Life Is a Dream (2009) is a wide-ranging collection of poems that Durcan published between 1967 and 2007. His 22nd volume of poetry, Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being, appeared in 2012.

Discover the fascinating events that shaped the world, straight from our editors.

SIGN UP

By clicking “Sign Up”, you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Britannica Quiz

Poetry: First Lines

The effects of Durcan’s humor are often satirical, generally in the spirit of the gentle mockery and amused tolerance of Horatian satire rather than the indignation of Juvenalian satire, although some poems strike harsh indictments of such topics as factional violence and paternal oppression. Durcan’s engagement with the political scene in Ireland during the 1980s is most memorably captured in poems such as “Poem Not Beginning with a Line by Pindar” (1993) and “The Dublin-Belfast Railway Line” (1990).