Paul Durcan was born in Dublin on October 16, 1944. He received a B.A. from University College Cork, and won the prestigious Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 1990 for 'Daddy, Daddy'. He is generally regarded as a social critic and satirist, his main targets Irish social and religious institutions, but this hardly honors the complexity of his often surreal, idiosyncratic, iconoclastic, relentlessly contemporary outrage against the antilife forces that he sees about him. For a variety of conflicting reasons, he has been compared to Patrick Kavanagh (for his attacks on Irish society), D.H. Lawrence (for his tendency to write 'poetry of the present moment'), W.B. Yeats (for measuring contemporary Ireland against a legendary backdrop), and Walt Whitman (for his evangelism).

Seamus Heaney detects a 'tension between the lyrical and the anti-lyrical, between intensity and irony, between innocence and fear' in Durcan's work, and this is certainly true not only in his apparent political nonpartisanship (i.e. he opposes both the British and the IRA) but also in a style that is often characterized as uneven. Typically, a Durcan poem will begin with an engagingly patterned lyricism that, as one gets further into the poem, seems to gravitate into, as David Profume says, 'corrugated vernacular prose.' This may, to some, seem an evocative 'montage of the banal and exotic,' as Gerald Dawe puts it, but to more traditional others it seems a calamitous disregard of craft.

Durcan's titles deserve mention simply because of their succinct wit. Often the title itself is a precis of the poem proper" 'Three Hundred Men Made Redundant,' 'The Bishop of Cork Murders His Wife,' ' The Perfect Nazi Family is Alive and Well and Prospering in Modern Ireland,' or 'The Visionary Bureau in Lisdoonvarna.' A distinct, jokey roguishness to Durcan's art wins him such sobriquets as the 'Playboy of Western Surrealism' or 'Stevie Smith imitating Damon Runyon.' This might cause some to wonder if his admittedly powerful urgent energy is not bought at the expense of salutary restraint.

Durcan has been publishing his poetry since the late 1960s but only gained serious critical notice with the Selected Paul Durcan in 1982. This collection contains poems from four previous volumes: O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor (1975), Teresa's Bar (1976), Sam's Cross (1978), and Jesus, Break His Fall (1980). Jumping the Train Tracks with Angela (1983) is an unevenly eccentirc collection of the ridiculous and the sublime, full of jokes (both good and bad) with a touch of dark humor directed at the repressive social and religious practices in Ireland. The Berlin Wall Café (1985) has a sharper focus but still raises the question, For all its inventiveness and wit, does one want to read any of his poems again? Daddy, Daddy (1990), as the title suggests, concerns the death of Durcan's father but also touches on the poet's characteristic political, social, and religious concerns. (Thomas F. Merrill from the Dictionary of Irish Literature)

His newest book, Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (1999), is his most challenging and engaging collection yet, one that addresses itself through Ireland and the Irish diaspora to the whole world beyond. It is his most personal and his most public work, a book of tremendous imaginative power, fusing autobiography with a record of the public life of a nation. By turns lyrical, humorous, angry, whimsical, generous and visionary, it is a meticulously honest record of a writer's inner life and a bold attempt to fix the soul of his country at a particular time: the years of Mary Robinson's presidency. Durcan's unmistakable voice, by turns funny, savage, tender, wise, sweetly melancholic and ever self-mocking, has matured into an instrument of extraordinary power, able to find an audience far beyond the usual readership of poetry. The pain and recovery of Paul Durcan's inner odyssey are mirrored in the images of an Ireland awakening from the nightmare of its violent past. He meticulously catalogues each new atrocity of his nation - bombings, sectarian murder, arson - juxtaposing them with images of Ireland becoming freer and more cosmopolitan, and finding in Mary Robinson the unifying symbol for this new, more hopeful age.