Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil Book

Paul Durcan's quirky poems have ever oscillated between a twinkling delight in the ordinary, day-to-day detail and a delicious surrealism that serves to find the absurdity in life and love. Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil is an enormous book, part diary and part a collection of postcards, letters and mad telegrams; it sweeps from the Catholic missions with the poor of Brazil to Ireland under Mary Robinson to the Troubles; his extended piece on the Omagh bombing is astonishing, containing a searing and deadly serious satire on the IRA in the wake of Gerry Adam's first ever condemnation of a bombing; litanies to the dead; and gestures to the life that continues. Its agonised refusal to forgive is wrought from dignified anger.What is so successful, here and elsewhere, is that Durcan contextualises his amiable persona in wider and wider worlds. His friends and acquaintances are drawn in vivid, excitable flourishes, and his ambiguous relationship with Roman Catholicism is reflected in a style that cheerfully pastiches the forms of its services. His sequence of poems for the late great poet Patrick Kavanagh are wildly surreal and hilarious, but absolutely capture the essences of the man and what he meant to Durcan. Even when serious, the poems are playful, conversational, eminently readable, warm and loveable; when Durcan writes "What is poetry? / The art of being informal in a formal setting", it's not a manifesto, but does have a truth to it; he is an eccentric, amused and amusing man, but in troubled times, the Holy Fool has words that the men in suits and uniforms must listen to. --Bob PottsRead More