The Laughter of Mothers by Paul Durcan
"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.
Paul Durcan is one of Ireland's foremost poets. He 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), A Snail in My Prime: New and Selected Poems (1993), Cries of an Irish Caveman: New Poems (2001), The Art of Life (2004) and The Laughter of Mothers (2008). In 2009 he published a selection of his work from the previous forty years in one volume, Life is a Dream. In 2001 Paul Durcan received a Cholmondeley Award. He was the Ireland Professor of Poetry 2004-2007. In 2009 he was conferred with an honorary degree by Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of Aosdana.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781846550232 |
| ISBN 10 | 1846550238 |
| Title | The Laughter of Mothers |
| Author | Paul Durcan |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Vintage Publishing |
| Year published | 2007-10-04 |
| Number of pages | 144 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |