
The Laughter of Mothers
Paul Durcan(Author)
Harvill Secker (Publisher)
Published on 15. November 2012
Book
Paperback/Softback
144 pages
978-1-84655-753-8 (ISBN)
Description
'Thank you, O golden mother, / For giving me a life,' says Paul Durcan in this brilliant new collection, a poignant tribute to 'the first woman I ever knew'. Sheila MacBride came from a political family - her uncle John MacBride was executed in 1916 for his part in the Easter Uprising - but when Sheila married into the 'black, red-roaring, fighting Durcans of Mayo' she was obliged to give up a promising legal career. These poems commemorate his mother as Paul Durcan remembers her playing golf, reading Tolstoy, and initiating him in the magic of the cinema. He recalls her compassion and loyalty when he was committed to a mental hospital in adolescence and how she endured the ordeal of her old age.
Durcan also muses upon the beauty of Greek women and questions our need for newspapers and the new religion of golf. He is beguiled by a beggar woman, enraged by a young man picking his nose on the Dublin-Sligo commuter train, and gets into difficulty at the security gate of Dublin airport.
Durcan also muses upon the beauty of Greek women and questions our need for newspapers and the new religion of golf. He is beguiled by a beggar woman, enraged by a young man picking his nose on the Dublin-Sligo commuter train, and gets into difficulty at the security gate of Dublin airport.
Reviews / Votes
The world is all the richer for this man's verse * Irish Independent * Durcan's voice speaks clearly on the page in poems of harrowing intimacy, politics and love * Carol Ann Duffy * Paul Durcan's Ireland is the one we inhabit. At times he is ready to celebrate the bizarre and the ordinary; at other times he is full of a surreal rage against both order and disorder -- Colm Toibin * Times Literary Supplement * Risky, complex, full of compassion, Durcan's interrogations of storytelling itself, of the juxtapositions and confluences of personal history and political struggle, are a bristling tour de force -- Deryn Rees-Jones * Independent * Durcan's importance as a writer, and his uniqueness, are still reassuringly evident * Guardian * Anyone who has attended one of his electrifying poetry readings and been reduced to hysteria (a common enough occurrence) can testify to the unique flavour of his work * Guardian *More details
Edition
Revised edition
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Edition type
Revised edition
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 129 mm
Thickness: 9 mm
Weight
162 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84655-753-8 (9781846557538)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Paul Durcan
The Laughter of Mothers
E-Book
01/2011
1st Edition
Vintage Digital
€14.99
Available for download
Person
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.