I first came across Paul Durcan (born 1944) at a dinner at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland in Dublin. (Odd that it’s still royal in a republic). I had been given a talk—on what, I have no memory—and after the dinner we had a reading from Durcan. We were all dressed in dinner jackets. He wasn’t. It was us who looked ridiculous. His poems were poignant, powerful, and funny, and since that night I’ve bought four of his poetry books, two of them wittily based on paintings in the national galleries in London and Dublin. I’m just coming to the end of reading my way right through Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil, which has poems with titles like “Brazilian Footballer—Please Do Not Pedestalise,” “At the Funeral Mass in Tang and the Burial Afterwards in Shrule of Dr Hugh M Drummond,” and “The Shankill Road Massacre, 23 October 1993.” Durcan can write a poem about anything.

One of my favourite poems, which I have returned to again and again over 35 years for comfort is “Teresa’s Bar.” It’s a poem perhaps more for men than women about being shut in an Irish bar while “Outside in the rain the powers-that-be/Chemist, draper, garda, priests/Paced up and down in unspeakable rage/That we would sit all day in Teresa’s Bar
“Doing nothing.” It’s a pub where “ There is no time for…/ The Garda Siochana or the Guardia Civil—/The Poetry Society or the GAA—/The Rugby Club or the Maynooth Hierarchy—/RTE or Conor’s Cabaret—. There is warmth, whiskey, and a woman’s arms. It’s the place to be, a better picture of heaven than the religious can compose.

Teresa’s Bar by Paul Durcan

We sat all day in Teresa’s Bar
And talked, or did not talk the day away;
The only danger was that we might not leave sober
But that is a price you have to pay.
Outside in the rain the powers-that-be
Chemist, draper, garda, priests
Paced up and down in unspeakable rage
That we would sit all day in Teresa’s Bar
“Doing nothing.”

Behind the bar it was often empty;
Teresa, like all of us,
Besides doing nothing
Had other things to do
Such as cooking meals
Or washing out underwear
For her mad father
And her madder husband,
Or enduring their screams.

But Teresa deep down had no time for time
Or for those whose business has to do with time;
She would lean against the bar and smile through her weariness
By turns being serious and light with us.
Her eyes were birds on the waves of the sea;
A mother-figure but also a sun-girl;
An image of tranquillity but of perpetual creation;
A process in which there is no contradiction
For those with the guts not to be blackmailed by time.

There is no time in Teresa’s Bar;
The Garda Siochana or the Guardia Civil—
The Poetry Society or the GAA—
The Rugby Club or the Maynooth Hierarchy—
RTE or Conor’s Cabaret—
It makes no difference in Teresa’s Bar
Where the air is annotated with the tobacco smoke of inventiveness
As the mind of a Berkleyan philosopher.

The small town abounds with rumours
About Teresa’s Bar;
A hive of drug-takers (poor bees)
A nest of fornicators (poor birds)
Homosexual not to mention heterosexual;
Poor birds and bees trapped in metaphors of malice,
The truth is that here, as long by the path
By the river that flows by the edge of the town,
Young and old meet in a life-obtaining sequence
Of days interspersed by nights, by seasons by seasons,
Deaths by deaths;
While the members of the resurrection of judgement
Growl and scowl behind arrases in drawing rooms
Here are the members of the resurrection of life
And their tutelary goddess is Teresa
Thirty-five, small, heavy, dark,
And who would sleep with any man who was honest enough
Not to mouth the platitudes of love;
A sensual woman, brave and true,
Bringer of dry wisdom and free laughter
As well as glasses and bowls,
And who has sent for the into the hostile world
Persons whose universal compassion is infinitesimally more catholic
That that of any scion of academe
Such as James Felix Hennessy
Who has been on the dole for sixteen years
As well as making poems and reading books
And who when accused of obscenity
By the Right Rev Fr O’Doherty
Riposted with the humility of Melchisedech:
“You must learn the reality of the flesh, Father;
You must learn the reality of the flesh.”

If there be a heaven
Heaven would be
Being with Teresa
Inside the rain;
So let’s lock up the bar, Teresa
Lay ourselves on the floor
Put some more coal on the fire,
Pour ourselves each a large whiskey;
Let’s drink to Teresa of Teresa’s Bar
Reclining on the floor with one of her boys,
And big yellow coals burning bright,
And yellowish whiskey in a brown bottle,
And outside a downpour relentlessly pouring down.