The Laughter of Mothers - Hardcover

Durcan, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846550238 ISBN 13: 9781846550232

Publisher: Harvill Secker, 2007

Synopsis

"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.
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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.

About this title

Review:

"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 Tóibín Times Literary Supplement)

Book Description:

An outstanding collection including very personal poems. Durcan's finest for many years

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvill Secker
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1846550238
• ISBN 13: 9781846550232
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 131