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Snail In My Prime
Snail In My Prime
Apr 19, 2025 1:47 AM

Author:Paul Durcan

Snail In My Prime

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 borne out the truth of Ezra Pound's dictum that "literature is news that stays news".

This book contains Durcan's own selection from his work. It is a literary milestone that has set the seal on his reputation as a poet of international standing.

Reviews

To have heard him adds another pleasure to the reading of the work- but the voice speaks clearly on the page in poems of harrowing intimacy, politics and love. He holds a mirror up to himself: but we can see ourselves over his shoulder, whoever we are

—— Carol Ann Duffy , Guardian

Durcan's... tall stories, dialogues and choruses, remind us that poetry can have popular reach and embody a genuinely countrywide spirit, without sacrificing integrity

—— Glyn Maxwell , Independent on Sunday

Durcan's mastery of tone, his manic confidentiality, his blithe expositions of the seemingly unthinkable, his hypnotic repetitions of what other poets would hardly dare to utter once, all help to give [his work] an air of audacious authority unique in contemporary poetry

—— Brendan Kennnelly , Irish Times

For him poetry is story-telling and his stories are told in a direct fashion that makes them totally accessible... Paul Durcan's poetry sings

—— Roger McGough , Sunday Tribune

Like all first-class comedians, he is deadly serious

—— Terry Eagleton , Stand

Paul Durcan has a great comic gift

—— Colb Toibin , Sunday Independent

By universal consent of critics and common readers, Faulkner is now recognised as the strongest American novelist of the century, clearly surpassing Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, and standing as an equal in the sequence that includes Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain and Henry James

—— Harold Bloom

His mind to him a kingdom was; or rather, a county, Yoknapatawpha. He breathed on it and gave it life, a luminous world of rustics, comic and sinister, of inchoate historical processes and tragic human beings, earning dignity by endurance

—— Independent
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