Product Description
80 at 80
Author(s): Paul Durcan
Format: Hardback
An Irish Times Bestseller: a new selection of Paul Durcan's finest poems.
'He has written immortal poems. I revere him' Michael Longley
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
About the Author
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.
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