… an old post of mine about one of his poems.

Paul Durcan’s poem, Glocca Morra, will mark Father’s Day at University Diaries. It’s a cheery miserable morbid sort of thing which UD discovered in this morbid volume. She doesn’t find the poem online, so she will simply quote parts of it here – enough to give you a sense of the thing. (The poem also appears in this collection.)

It’s a longish unrhymed casually expressed series of thoughts the writer has while gazing at his father dying in a hospital bed.

The whole poem, beginning Dear Daughter and ending Love, Dad is a letter to Durcan’s daughter, who “one day … will watch me die” as the poet now watches his father die. Generation after generation, the poet suggests, people closest to one another, who most love one another, remain painful mutual mysteries. (Norman Maclean’s father says to him, in A River Runs Through It, “It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”)

Someone a few beds over has a little radio, on which the treacly How are Things in Glocca Morra?, from the musical Finian’s Rainbow, is playing. The song evokes a “fine day” in an idealized Irish village, nostalgically yearned after by the speaker, who has left it.

The cheap Irish sentimentality of that song counterposes itself throughout the poem to the bitter reality of the poet’s unfinished business with his always-remote, soon to vanish, father. When the poet was young, he and his father played games together in Phoenix Park:

Football, hurling, cricket, golf, donkey,
Before he got into his Abraham-and-Isaac phase
And I got the boat to England
Before he had time to chop off my head.

The transistor reminds him of

The day you bought your first transistor
You took us out for a drive in the car
The Vauxhall Viva,
Down to a derelict hotel by the sea,
The Glocca Morra,
Roofless, windowless, silent,
And, you used add with a chuckle,
Scandalous.

This is stream of consciousness, thought association, random music prompting a memory of a place in time when that same song emerged — in this particular case, as the name of a seaside hotel. The poet recalls the same irony that animates his reflections in the poem — the distance between that name’s winsome evocations, and the derelict reality to which the name is affixed.

You dandled it on your knee
And you stated how marvellous a gadget it was
A portable transistor,
And that you did not have to pay
A licence fee for it,
You chuckled.
A man not much known for chuckling.
The Glocca Morra,
Roofless, windowless, silent and scandalous.

Dandled it, like a child; stated how marvellous it was, this beautiful thing you could lift and carry around with you, like a child. In the silent dereliction of the father’s emotionless world, and now in the roofless windowless silence of the dying father’s ultimate vulnerability, this will turn out to be the best his son will get by way of paternal love — this moment of oblique joy. It will do.

Realizing this now, the poet begins to cry (The tears are lumbering down my cheeks ), and the tears awaken another, equally important memory – the memory of his father’s handwriting:

You had a lovely hand,
Cursive, flourishing, exuberant, grateful, actual, generous.

The son has been able, at the father’s moment of death, to reanimate him, to recall, in an act of filial blessing and love, the most intensely vivid life within the man. He has been able to decode a little bit the mystery of the transistor, the mystery of human transmission; and he shares that mystery – for what it’s worth – with his daughter.

If she too one day watches him die, as he has just watched his father die, the poet advises her to

Consider the paintwork on the wall
And check out the music in the next bed
‘How are Things in Glocca Morra?’
Every bit as bad as you might think they are –
Or as good. Or not so bad. Love, Dad.