Wild, Wild Erie

Poems Inspired by Paintings and Sculpture in the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio

Paul Durcan Published by the Toledo Museum of Art

Born in Dublin in 1944, Paul Durcan is a leading poet in Ireland, winner of the Whitbread Poetry award (1990), and celebrated as one of the most original voices in modern Irish literature. Unsparingly satirical, Durcan’s poetry tackles social and political hypocrisies, but also can be intensely personal, mining his own relationships and everyday experiences to paint vivid but unorthodox—even surreal—scenes. As passionate about art as he is about writing, his poetry is strikingly visual and often directly responds to artists and their work. He has previously written poetry inspired by the collections of the National Gallery of Ireland and the National Gallery, London.

In his first project with an American museum, Durchan has written 50 original poems based on works selected from the Toledo Museum of Art’s world-class collection. Durcan’s wry observations, speculations, and fabrications about the artworks’s subjects open new avenues for readers to respond both to the poems and to the art, creating new contexts and ways of seeing for a unique and illuminating literary and artistic experience.

Paul Durcan is a Whitbread Prize-winning poet for the collection Daddy, Daddy (1990), recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Irish Book Award in 2014, and author, most recently, of Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being (2012) and The Days of Surprise (2015).