Duke and Durcan at Listowel Writers' Week

John B Keane 

Headquarters 

I love Listowel Writers' Week allied as it is  to that period in early June when  the routines of term time draw to a close and the anticipation of summer activities stretch invitingly ahead  with all the pleasure of  anticipation and none of the disappointment yet of failed expectation . After an arduous bus journey through the border counties of Limerick and Clare, I arrived in to a balmy  Listowel just in time for the evening programme on Friday and made straight for the nerve centre of operations. The ambience  in the Listowel Arms Hotel  was just as I remembered it  from my last visit in 2009. There was a leisurely buzz as  poets composed themselves in corners,  book club ladies nattered in the lobby and literary types  lingered over  diner in the dining room. Fiddle player and poet John Sheehan was a familiar presence in the foyer and well known faces from the book review pages ambled around the bar meeting and greeting.   'You're meeting that Germaine Greer wan tomorrow-she'll ate you without salt boy! '  quipped one punter  in a Durcanesque line   to a  media figure in Listowel to interview the notorious feminist academic. ' (We can but hope).

Saffron and Blue Poet

Clad in saffron and  blue, his ensemble perfectly matching the backdrop curtains , Paul Durcan read  from his latest collection, 'Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being' .  The poems were mostly humorous takes on the mundane events in life , full of inventive similes laden with unlikely adjectives and sprinkled with with occasional lines in French and Latin  adding a touch literary spice, gentle lampooning rather than bitter satire.  A trip to a convenience store  and an exchange with a checkout assistant provides  fodder for  A Man Besotted By His Batch . Durcan doesn't so much read from his work as declaim it in a theatrical manner  and  very entertaining he is too with the capacity ballroom audience lapping it up. Maybe it was the languid delivery , the audience hanging on every word or the drawing of much humour from the mundane frustrations of everyday life but I was reminded of late comedian Dave Allen. Durcan presented his work neat and undiluted by  unnecessary introductions or context setting asides.                                                                        

Big Top Duo 

More theatricality followed  after a rather long introduction in the Fossetts Circus tent  where Belfast singer songwriter, Duke Special accompanied by  percussionist  Chip Bailey performed an entertaining  and inventive set.  What a good idea to look for a synergy  with the circus  in town during the festival. While I found the duo  interesting and appealing performers,  the amplification  was excessive I felt and the big top  much too large a venue for the assembled  audience and a smaller more intimate venue might have been more convivial. 

Veranda at twilight

Back at the  Listowel Arms , the  pianist had just began to play the boudoir grand piano and the sing song was in full swing on the veranda For the duration of the festival, this busy hotel with its view of the racecourse becomes a stage  where arenas of sport and letters  collide with all the main players and incidental characters of this one week drama passing through at some point before the curtain closes.


More fun to follow tomorrow with the literary bus trip with obligatory sing song through the wonderfully named Lyracumpane a must  amongst the many delights this festival has to offer.  

One of the many themed window displays 

extract from 

A Man Besotted By His Batch
By Paul Durcan


In the SPAR supermarket on Merrion Row....
..........
 He was all bonhomie but not excessively.
He commented on my every item
But when I handed him
My Batch Loaf of Bread
He seized-up, swooned, swayed, roared:
“Jasus!” he roared “a Batch!”

He continued as if performing an aria in the Messiah...