Give me your hand: Poems

I found this book on bargain sale in a bookshop in Kilkenny last summer. I only knew a few Paul Durcan poems, including one in which he compares his beloved to a pint of stout. This collection, with its beautiful color plates of paintings from the National Gallery in London, is a delight to look at, and its poems, which go with specific paintings, are always surprising and often simultaneously satiric and tragic. Durcan creates narrators who are participants in and commentators on the scenes depicted in the paintings; the voices he create always seem fitting but are never predictable. I have used poems and images from this book in my junior and senior high school English classes, and the students have quickly taken to them. Full of pathos and bathos, these portraits have grabbed my heart and mind in a way I didn't expect when I (rather randomly) pulled the book off of the shelf in Kilkenny. I wish the book were back in print!