O Westport In The Light Of Asia Minor

‘Durcan’s mastery of tone, his manic confidentiality, his blithe expositions of the seemingly unthinkable, his hypnotic repetitions of what other poets would hardly dare utter once… give an air of audacious authority unique in contemporary poetry’ - Brendan Kennelly, Irish Times

WINNER OF THE 2014 IRISH BOOK LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor was first published in a tiny edition in Dublin in 1975. It was Paul Durcan’s first fully-fledged collection, and already displays an astonishingly mature, visionary power, shot through with the surrealism and heart-breaking comedy that have since become his hallmark. It won him the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Now Durcan’s readers can discover what they have been missing. The poems are printed in the order he originally intended, and the volume concluded with six poems from his very first collaborative collection, Endsville (1967), with Brian Lynch.