Published by Vintage Publishing
Format: Paperback
£8.99
Author:
Paul Durcan
Format: Paperback
EAN: 9781860460883
£8.99
Available for dispatch within 1-2 working days
EAN: 9781860460883
Published: 2 Nov 1995
This was the collection with which Durcan broke through to the huge and appreciative audience he enjoys today. In the first part are poems of great satirical comedy and also of great passion and indignation, and in the second part, poems about the break-up of a marriage so intense they would hurt if they weren't also possessed of the healing gifts of truthfulness and humour. In The Berlin Wall Café Durcan has located that space between the walls and barriers societies and individuals erect - a no-man's-land of the free imagination where we meet as the vulnerable and comical human beings we are. It contains some of his very best work.
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Paul Durcan was born in Dublin in 1944, of County Mayo parents, and studies archaeology and medieval history at University College Cork. His first book, Endsville (with Brian Lynch), appeared in 1967, and has been followed by 14 others, including O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor (1975), Teresa's Bar (1976), Sam's Cross(1978), Jesus, Break His Fall (1980), Jumping the Train Tickets with Angela (1983), The Berlin Wall Café (Poetry Book Society Choice, 1985), Going Home to Russia (1987), Daddy ,Daddy (1990), Crazy about Women (1991), A Snail in My Prime: New and Selected Poems (1993) and Give Me Your Hand (1994). In 1974 he won the Patrick Kavanagh Award and in 1978 and 1980 received Creative Writing Bursaries from the Arts Council/ An Chomhairle Ealaíon, Ireland. Apart from Britain and Ireland, he has also read in the former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, the USA (where in 1985 he was resident poet at The Frost Place, New Hampshire), Canada (including the 1995 Vancouver International Writers Festival), Holland (at the Rotterdam International Poetry Festival), France, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium, New Zealand (Writers' and Readers' Week), Israel and, in 1995, Germany and Brazil. In October 1989 he received the Irish American Cultural Institute Poetry Award and in 1990 won the Whitbread Poetry Award with Daddy, Daddy. In the same year he was Writer in Residence at Trinity College Dublin. His most recent publication is the book-length poem Christmas Day (1996), which also contains his tribute to Seamus Heaney on winning the Nobel Prize for literature. He was jointly awarded the Heinemann Bequest, 1995, by the Royal Society for Literature. He is a member of Aosdána and lives in Dublin.
