O Westport In The Light Of Asia Minor

(Paperback)

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'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 utter once... give an air of audacious authority unique in contemporary poetry' - Brendan Kennelly, Irish Times WINNER OF THE 2014 IRISH BOOK LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor was first published in a tiny edition in Dublin in 1975. It was Paul Durcan's first fully-fledged collection, and already displays an astonishingly mature, visionary power, shot through with the surrealism and heart-breaking comedy that have since become his hallmark. It won him the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Now Durcan's readers can discover what they have been missing. The poems are printed in the order he originally intended, and the volume concluded with six poems from his very first collaborative collection, Endsville (1967), with Brian Lynch.

Reviews

Paul Durcan... is one of the country's leading living poets... His strange, mesmerising voice wraps itself around every syllable and texture of his poems, wrapping the audience into its very spell, into the very grain of the text -- Michael Cunningham * Irish Times *
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 *
This is the real thing. One can't say more, or less than that -- David Wright * Cyphers *

Author Bio

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 Cafe (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 Aosdana.