Paul Durcan’s Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil gathers one hundred poems in his unmistakably conversational, wandering, theatrical mode. 

We walk through Dublin streets, Rio, friendship, aging, death, absurdity, erotic tenderness, political weather and encounter the everything of other people. Durcan’s poems often feel like anecdotes that have been drinking with saints, taxi drivers, lovers, ghosts, and minor public officials; they begin somewhere plain and then quietly remove the floorboards.

Durcan’s work is intimate, comic, mournful, and frequently surreal, with a gift for sudden emotional swerves that refuse the respectable dullness of “poetic seriousness.” A strong fit for readers of contemporary Irish poetry, anecdotal lyric, comic melancholy, and poetry that allows the ridiculous and the sacred to share a table without making a speech about it.

Harvill Press hardback, first edition, 1999. Very good second-hand condition with light shelfwear and minor jacket wear.