A Snail in My Prime: Selected Poems

by Paul Durcan

Since the publication of his first book in 1967, Paul Durcan has made satirical, celebratory and extraordinarily moving poetry out of his country's fortunes and misfortunes. His readings are legendary and each new collection, from his collaboration with Brain Lynch, Endsville (1967) to Daddy, Daddy (winner of the 1990 Whitbread Poetry Award), Crazy about Women (1991) and Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (1999) has...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1860461875
• ISBN13: 9781860461873
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Harvill Press
• Length: 271 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Deceptively casual surfaces, deeply disturbing depths

Reading this collection of mostly selected (by the author himself) and new--interspersed chronologically--poems by an author I'd long shied away from, suspecting him to be pandering to a self-satisfied crowd of smug know-it-alls, I was surprised. Once you get past the collar-grabbing effusiveness of many of the titles (they sound often like tabloid headlines or a hippie songwriter's snide put-downs), you realise the intensity of vision that goes into their making. Like many musicians, by the way, he's supposed to really make the messages come alive on stage. Not having had the opportunity, the page must suffice. But the sense that Durcan needs an audience to energise his skills can be conveyed here nonetheless. Although I predict many of his earlier, context-specific poems on scandals and pontifications within Irish 70s-90s society will become dated for a newer readers from a more cynical, multicultural, and secular Ireland, still--Durcan's pairing of paintings with poems, his exposure of his own vulnerability within sexual, marital, and post-marital situations, and his delight in the female, the subversive, and the exotic all establish him as a major contributor to the resurgence of contemporary Irish culture.