Poet finds that life at its best is never immaculate

Harvill (HarperCollins) with the Blackstaff Press, #16 (paperback

#7.99) (pp 272)

YEARS before the shenanigans of the Bishop of Galway were disclosed to

a salivating public in Ireland, Paul Durcan had been presenting exposes

of clerical frockings and defrockings. Poems such as ''Archbishop of

Kerry to Have Abortion'' and ''Priest Accused of Not Wearing a Condom''

indicated only the tip of a boiling volcano, a volcano created by and

barely contained by repressive dogmas and legislation. Durcan's

outrageous irreverence has been welcomed in Ireland not simply because

it touches the truth but also because a straightforwardness and

humaneness in him suggest sympathy rather than castigation.

In ''Sister Agnes Writes to Her Beloved Mother'' the ''big news'' is

divulged. ''Rev. Mother is pregnant;/ The whole convent is simply

delighted;/ We don't know who the lucky father is/ But we have a shrewd

idea who it might be.'' The ordinary gossip of egg cosies and babies in

the letter home is precisely what Durcan finds hopeful against the

immaculate negat-

ivities of the Catholic Church. For him, life at its best is never

immaculate.

Durcan was born in 1944 and has, since 1967, published more than a

dozen collections of poems. His readings in recent years have elicited

general enthusiasm although I must confess to feeling impressed rather

than wowed. His books sell in large quantities and he has won many

awards including the Whitbread Poetry prize in 1990. He is a genuinely

exciting and popular poet. Wherein lies his appeal? And does his appeal

always extend beyond Ireland?

There is something in Ireland, its awkward mixture of cosy intimacy

and tribal frictions of orthodoxies and heterodoxies not to mention

other doxies, which encourages a satirical edge in its writers. Swift

and Shaw spring most immediately to mind but a poet in this tradition

who deserves a wider audience is Brian Merriman whose A Midnight Court,

written in Irish (1780), is a widely funny ridiculing of current

attitudes to sex and the Church.

At present, the two poets most prominent in challenging and mocking

staid conformism are Durcan and Brendan Kennelly, whose Cromwell and

Book Of Judas have been gobbled up in sensational numbers. There appear

to be two elements in this success. First, the Holy Land of Ireland,

Island of Saints, maintains a wondrous herd of sacred cows growing fat

on the Emerald Isle. Durcan and Kennelly have certainly milked or soured

the sacred cows. Second, modern Catholic Ireland seems to find private

confession no longer adequate; it requires open exhibitions of

inadequacy, not to a priest but to the congregation of the people.

(Perhaps Italy's laundering of dirty money in public is comparable.)

Kennelly and Durcan have bared their souls.

This new selection is a hefty volume, but, because Durcan has been so

prolific, it has excluded a great deal, sometimes my own favourites such

as ''The Man with Five Penises'' and ''High-Speed Car Wash''. The

selection does, however, allow readers to follow the poet's development

and the new poems show no diminishing of his ability to shock and

delight.

He takes on so many different subjects that it is impossible to

categorise his themes in any tidy way. Also poems often begin in a place

or mood very different from what confronts us at the end. Surreal leaps,

associative slides, disruptive interruptions are all characteristic of

his poetry and a central pleasure for the reader consists in feeling

that Durcan is a magician of transformations and we are passengers on a

mystery tour.

For a poet of such extravagance he is capable of quietness and very

telling understatement or simple directness. The poem ''Ireland 1972''

delivers its punch in two lines: ''Next to the fresh grave of my beloved

grandmother/ The grave of my first love murdered by my brother''. He has

written about the violence and sectarianism in Northern Ireland with

disgust and an utterly unpartisan sympathy. Furthermore, the North is

not for him, as it is for many in the South, a problematic annexe which

can be claimed or denied as convenient; for him it is an area of his

ordinary understanding and failure to under-

stand.

In his desire to catch the impulse of the moment, he has undoubtedly

written some indulgent and inconsequential poems and many of these have

been discarded in this selection. Sometimes, too, he can adopt a

Whitmanesque ultra-tolerance or humility in the face of any experience,

any person, which I find rather solemn and righteous.

This, luckily, is not a permanent condition but it can disable some

poems which have much else to commend them. The satirical role may

encourage such lapses and shooting at Aunt Sallies can end up by giving

a new solidity to the target; to the outside eye, it looks like a very

introverted Irish concern.

Nonetheless, his ability to imagine himself into other people's lives

and to present the daftness, the puzzlement, the prejudices and the

pleasures, is at the core of his appeal and his best poems are not just

remarkable but unique. Who else can immortalise a ''Diarrhoea Attack at

Party Headquarters in Leningrad'' or celebrate when ''My Beloved

Compares Herself to a Pint of Stout''? He enlarges our consciousness and

conscience. Even if the Bishop of Galway had worn a condom . . . he

would have known that Durcan would have known.