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17 Oct 2025

In memory of Paul Durcan - Mayo and internationally renowned poet

Westport poet Ger Reidy has penned a poem in honour of Paul Durcan

In memory of Paul Durcan - Mayo and internationally renowned poet honoured

Poet Paul Durcan was laid to rest in Westport in May

On what would have been Paul Durcan’s eighty-first birthday, The Mayo News is publishing a poem written by Gerard Reidy. 

In Memory of Paul Durcan

Outside the church a woman broke through the crowd,

came from nowhere, to touch your wicker coffin.

A hay bailer got tangled up in the cortege as the rain fell.

Your memorial photo placed among the O Malleys and Gieltys.

This is what you would have wanted.

In Aughavale, petrichor rose up from the soil,

while the Reek was busy manufacturing nimbus.

At the graveside Dan piped a tune from Asia Minor,

filled in by a man who milks thirty Friesians.

This too is what you would have wanted.

You who slashed your wrists every day at the altar of poetry,

you who stripped in the town square to indifferent multitudes,

you who lifted the mirror to our republican absurdity,

you who harnessed humour on your voyage into the abyss ,

you who released the humanity clogged in our subconscious.

Gerard Reidy

The poem was written on the day that Paul Durcan was buried in Westport.

READ MORE: Paul Durcan laid to rest: 'We should all be saddened' says former Taoiseach

Ger Reidy explains that he was "quite moved by the fact that he was buried in Westport, in the town that he has strong family links with, and the fact that he wrote so much about Westport and Mayo."

"He's very much a Mayo poet, even though he's nationally and internationally acknowledged and renowned as a poet of the absurd and the surreal. He opened the door for a lot of younger posts to write in a similar tradition.”

Hearing Paul Durcan read his poems was to be dragged directly into the drama of the words written on the page.

"He was a very dramatic reader, and when he read his poems, he invested his full kind of being in reading the poem,” Reidy asserts.

Reidy describes Durcan as being a “a template for how the rest of us should read our poems. He added the meaning and the drama into the poem, and he just celebrated his own work, in a way which the rest of us are only learning to do. You know, he got the most out of the poem."

“Reading a poem gives the poem more depth and brings up more meaning in the poem. If the poem is read properly and read at the right pace and with the right tone, I think the meaning of the poem is expanded to exhaust the full potential of the poem when it's read properly,” Reidy tells The Mayo News. 

As well as writing so much about Westport and Mayo, Durcan was also "a great favourite of Westport audiences. He always packed the venues, and spent lots of time signing his books and had a very close relationship with his readers."

Westport audiences will be able to enjoy his poetry being read aloud once more at the upcoming Westival. 

Paul Durcan's works will be celebrated as part of Westival and on Saturday, October 25, 'Paul Durcan Poetry - Going Home to Mayo' will be taking place in Grove House Westport.

Ger Reidy is hosting the event and he will be joined by poets Michael O’Loughlin, Seán Lysaght and Mary Madec. They will be reading their favourite Paul Durcan Poems and will be accompanied by music from multi-talented piper and flautist Diarmaid Moynihan.

The renowned poet's first cousin, Mary MacBride Walsh, whose father Erc MacBride was a brother of Paul's sister Sheila, will also speak at the event. 

READ MORE: Poet Paul Durcan to be buried in MacBride family plot in Mayo cemetery

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