A Snail in My Prime: New and Selected Poems (Poets, Penguin) [Mass Market Paperback]

Paul Durcan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1995 | Series: Poets, Penguin

Paul Durcan is one of Ireland's most popular and controversial poets. Since the publication of his first book in 1967, he has made satirical, celebratory and moving poetry out of his and his country's fortunes and misfortunes. This collection a number of new poems as well as poems from "Endsville", "Teresa's Bar", "The Berlin Wall Cafe", and "Going Home to Russia". The author's book "Daddy, Daddy" won the Whitbread Poetry Award in 1990.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (September 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140587209
• ISBN-13: 978-0140587203
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,402,515 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Deceptively casual surfaces, deeply disturbing depths, February 24, 2005

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Snail in My Prime (Paperback)

Reading this collection of mostly selected (by the author himself) and new--interspersed chronologically--poems by an author I'd long shied away from, suspecting him to be pandering to a self-satisfied crowd of smug know-it-alls, I was surprised. Once you get past the collar-grabbing effusiveness of many of the titles (they sound often like tabloid headlines or a hippie songwriter's snide put-downs), you realise the intensity of vision that goes into their making. Like many musicians, by the way, he's supposed to really make the messages come alive on stage. Not having had the opportunity, the page must suffice.

But the sense that Durcan needs an audience to energise his skills can be conveyed here nonetheless. Although I predict many of his earlier, context-specific poems on scandals and pontifications within Irish 70s-90s society will become dated for a newer readers from a more cynical, multicultural, and secular Ireland, still--Durcan's pairing of paintings with poems, his exposure of his own vulnerability within sexual, marital, and post-marital situations, and his delight in the female, the subversive, and the exotic all establish him as a major contributor to the resurgence of contemporary Irish culture.