Oh shit.....
I have decided it's time I owned up and told the world (or as much of the world as comes to this website) that I have been remiss. (Hang on. I just need to check “remiss” means what I think it means. “Remiss: adj negligent; slack; lax; lacking vigour.”) Oh yes, I have been all of those things, quite often. But the main thing I have been in connection with what I want to say is that I have been negligent. At Christmas I was handed a copy of Paul Durcan’s “The Art of Life” by friends who had also been given it. They didn’t want it. They didn’t want it because they thought it was rubbish. I glanced through it when they gave it to me and agreed that it certainly did look like what literary critics, if they are honest (and they are not always that), call “rubbish”. I agreed to take it off their hands and out of their house (and to the household waste tip if necessary) in return for a glass of wine and a mince pie. It was Christmas.
The book has poems in it like this:
Ireland 2001
Where’s my bikini?
We’ll be late for Mass.
Yes, I know. You think I’m taking the piss. I’m not. The book is a hardback book, and it costs £12, which is not cheap, and it's published by The Harvill Press. It has a paper wrap-around cover, and around the paper wrap-around cover is a paper wrap-around slip which has on it a couple of quotes. This is where the lavish presentation of bad poems takes on a new aspect; it's where the silly becomes ludicrous. One of the quotes is by Alice Sebold, whoever the hell she is. I probably should know, but since this is what she says I don’t want to know at all. Not at all. She is obviously mad. She says
Durcan is a God.
This God wrote this poem:
Vi
At 93, she is a young girl laughing
At midnight in her doorway.
She cries: “Come again, come again!”
Exhausted, I limp away.

Yes. It does.
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