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Literature: Tis the season to be melancholy

Dominic Cavendish
Saturday 06 December 1997 00:02 GMT
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Irish poet Paul Durcan's `Christmas Day', which he will recite as part of the South Bank's final literature event of the year, may be seasonal, but it's certainly not festive

It was only a matter of strategy meetings before we had The Faber Book of Christmas, just out in paperback in time for the shopping frenzy. Odd, you might think, not to find a trace of Paul Durcan's "Christmas Day" in among the quality selection. Published last year, the poem's 14 cantos span the duration of one 25 December as lived by two friends, Paul and Frank.Then again, once you read it, you can understand why it couldn't easily be lumped in. Granted, writers have long savoured the bleakness of mid-winter, but this is as far removed from cotton-wool drifts of cheer as you can get: an intimate soul-searching, by turns painful and savagely funny. Inspired by the self-portraits of Lucien Freud and drawing strength from the ambition of Joyce's Ulysses, it is unapologetically autobiographical in feel and local in reference. Here, in a top-storey flat in the southern suburbs of Dublin, "Christmas is the Feast of St Loneliness" as the two men confront past griefs, lost loves and the aching "woman-hunger" of solitary middle-age in desultory conversation and sinuous recollection.

So why has Durcan, one of Ireland's foremost poets, agreed to recite it for the last South Bank literature event of the year before the Crimbo closedown? "It seemed like a logical thing to do, rather than go for a selection of my work," he explains, in the same quiet tones that can keep an audience spell-bound. "I haven't read it for a long time and I don't see myself reading it again for a long time. You don't just sit down and write a long poem and you don't just stand up and read it - it takes weeks to get into the right frame of mind.

"When I started out on it, at no point was I thinking of it as connected with the festive season. People of a superficial frame of mind might be crude enough to suggest that I was cashing in - well, they're welcome to say such a ludicrous thing. I took three years to write it and I have no doubt in my mind what it is." Critics certainly believe in its year- round value. For the uninitiated, it's a question, as always, of having faith.

Purcell Room, South Bank, SE1 (0171-960 4242) 10 Dec, 7.30pm, pounds 6

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