80 at 80
  • Published: 12 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529939521
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224
Categories:

80 at 80

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12 Sep 2024
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12 Oct 2024
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Published in celebration of Paul Durcan's 80th birthday, a selection of greatest hits from one of Ireland's most lauded and popular poets, with a special introduction by Colm Tóibin

\"A reminder - and an affirmation - of Paul Durcan's singular contribution not just to Irish poetic culture but the broader world of contemporary poetry\" Irish Times

For fifty years the poet Paul Durcan has explored and questioned a world both real and imagined.

Steeped in the goings-on of Ireland and preoccupied with its concerns, he has delighted, enriched and unsettled his readers. His prodigious output of more than twenty collections bursts with poems that are courageously personal and passionately spiritual – a body of work that contains multitudes.

‘The great enemy of art is the ego’ says Durcan. ‘It keeps getting in the way. One needs the ego to disappear so that I become you; I become the people walking up and down the street.’

First published in 1967, Durcan remains the most of companionable of poets. His vivacity and ability to surprise has never been clearer than in this new selection of eighty of his finest poems, published in celebration of his 80th birthday.

EDITED BY NIALL MACMONAGLE

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY COLM TOIBIN
  • Published: 12 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529939521
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224
Categories:

About the author

Paul Durcan

Paul Durcan was born in Dublin in 1944. His first book, Endsville (1967), has been followed by more than twenty others, including The Berlin Wall Café (a Poetry Book Society Choice in 1985), Daddy, Daddy (winner of the Whitbread Award for Poetry in 1990), Crazy About Women (1991), A Snail in My Prime: New and Selected Poems (1993), Give Me Your Hand (1994), Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (1999), The Art of Life (2004), The Laughter of Mothers (2007), Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967–2007 (2009), Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being (2012), and The Days of Surprise (2015). In 2001 Paul Durcan received a Cholmondeley Award. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2004 to 2007. He was conferred with a DLitt by Trinity College Dublin in 2009 and by University College Dublin in 2011. In 2014 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Irish Book Award. He is a member of Aosdána.

portrait photo of Paul Durcan

Also by Paul Durcan

The Days of Surprise
Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have my Being
Life is a Dream
The Laughter of Mothers
The Art Of Life
O Westport In The Light Of Asia Minor
The Berlin Wall Cafe
See all

Praise for 80 at 80

His is a once-in-a-generation talent. He has written immortal poems. I revere him.

Michael Longley

To have heard him read adds another pleasure to the reading of his work – but the voice speaks clearly on the page in poems of harrowing intimacy, politics and love

Carol Ann Duffy

Durcan is a God. He can break your heart in supermarket or petrol station. He is unafraid, masterful and exactly what this world needs more of: wild abandon, wild love and sheer mad genius

Alice Sebold

The world is all the richer for this man's verse

Irish Independent

Profoundly funny and profoundly moving... a wonderful collection from a national treasure

Connaught Telegraph

The work of a singular Irish poet is celebrated in this welcome compendium of classic Durcan poems

RTE