Paul Durcan, Irish Poet of Tortured and Tender Souls, Dies at 80

Books|Paul Durcan, Irish Poet of Tortured and Tender Souls, Is Dead at 80

Paul Durcan, an Irish poet whose droll, sardonic and frequently tender poems about lads in dimly lit pubs, quotidian life in the countryside and the trauma of political violence made him one of Ireland’s most popular writers of the 20th century, died on May 17 in Dublin. He was 80.

His death, in a nursing home, was caused by age-related myocardial degeneration, his daughter Sarah Durcan said.

In the annals of long-suffering poets, Mr. Durcan’s hardships probably merit special distinction. After he set about becoming a writer in the 1960s, his father — a hidebound judge who called him a “sissy” — apparently sent family members to remove him from a Dublin pub and then had him committed to a psychiatric hospital.

Mr. Durcan suffered through several years of electroshock treatments. He feared he would be lobotomized.

“I was seen as going the way of a poet,” he once said, “and that had to be stopped.”

After running away from the hospital, Mr. Durcan sought out fellow poets for assistance and mentorship, including Patrick Kavanagh, who helped him publish his work. Mr. Durcan channeled the trauma of his father’s emotional abandonment and the horrors of psychiatric wards into an unmistakable voice on the page.

“Durcan’s abundant imagination has indeed left us a universe of iconoclastic poems that combine art and everyday life, insight and originality,” the poet Gerard Smyth wrote in The Irish Times after Mr. Durcan’s death. “He was one of the great mavericks, a literary phenomenon with a commitment to poetry as a calling.”