Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     By a coincidence, the first section of Durcan’s book describes an experience of near-drowning off the coast of Australia, as if the awful mystery that lies at the heart of Richard Kell’s book is described here by another poet. ‘Give Him Bondi’, is a long and brilliant poem, in which the reader is lead innocently enough from the known and familiar into the heart of darkness. From his established position of a self-regarding, middle-aged man and poet, he is transformed into a helpless human being, aware for the first time in his life, of his own fragile mortality. This is an appealing theme, and Durcan tells it with exceptional candour, wit and tension. Little by little he unwittingly leaves behind him the safety of the known, those threads, indicators of whom we think we are:

My wristwatch - my twentieth-century tag;
My white shirt folded in a sandwich;
My black slacks curled in a chaste ball;
My black nylon socks twinned back to back;
My black leather slip-ons with fake gold studs.

     He strikes out into the ocean but after youthful frolics in the water, soon abandons the effort of swimming:

Being unfit, overweight, dead-beat.

He succumbs to the pleasure of floating and daydreaming only to find that he has drifted too far out to sea:

                     Out of sight
Of the flags! But I’m an old hand
At swimming. Didn’t Uncle Mick
Teach all of us to swim
At the age of seven
Off the famine pier
At Enniscrone of the Seaweed Baths?
Out of our depth
On the deep, steep steps
And not, not, not
To be afraid?

The poem goes on, between description, hysteria, memory and prayer:

Fear frying your bones.
I thought I had known fear -
Oceans of fear - but I had not:
Not until now
This moment of 100-carat fear;

If your have been afraid of drowning, as I have, this poem keeps your totally gripped until the end. He prays that the experience will change him:

That I have at last learnt
The necessity of being nothing,

This tour de force is a hard act to follow; part two of the book contains poems about friends and family in Ireland as well as several poems written during a stay in Sweden. Durcan’s voice is warm and intimate in a laid-back kind of way. He hears ‘talk’ and honours it unobtrusively, as this poem called ‘The Neighbour’, illustrates:

Isn’t it terrible about the Kursk?
In 1981 I picked up a copy -
I don’t read much -
Of Chekov’s plays and -
I’m not -
Wait till I tell you -
The Cherry Orchard -
Now I read it every winter.

     I found the last section of the book the hardest. The title poem is a brilliant evocation of the loneliness of abandonment. Thirty-nine terse mediations on loss. ‘XV’:

I think of you and he lounging in The Rose
                                                    and Goat:
The suction of your lipstick, he clearing his
                                                          throat.

But one such poem is not enough for Durcan, he creates a litany of bleakly black invectives against the woman who has left him, making me think that in this case, Congreve’s famous quote “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,/ Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned” should change its sex.

     In an extraordinary series of bitter bellowings, Durcan often metamorphises into a cow or a bullock, seeking revenge upon his unfaithful mistress. Like a compulsive self-harmer, Durcan returns to the scene of his bitterness, again and again, circling and embelishing the recurring images of his animal feelings against her deadly indifference or, at times, deliberate cruelty.

While I in the night by my manger toss
Marooned on the drumlin of my carcass
In a death watch that knows no shores
Or islands until the guillotine falls
And the meatslicer divides my parts.

In dawn light she swoops up in her bull-bar
To pick up her moiety - “his private parts”
Jovially she cries - and she illustrates them
In her public lectures with slides
To the Tipperary Cattle Farmers’ Association.

I suppose some jilted men will like such misogyny, but I grew tired of it. I longed for him to take heart and remember his experience from ‘Give Him Bondi’ when he vowed:

May I begin to listen.
May I decipher next time
Silence under gum trees