‘Derek Mahon’s poetry seems at first to have escaped the pressures of history altogether, insofar as these are seen as particular and pressing contingencies of events upon individual life. The poems have always gravitated towards a cold and unpeopled area, one that exists before, or after, what we recognise as history’ [194].

Dawe quotes ‘The Spring Vacation’ (orig. ‘In Belfast’): ‘[…] I resume my old conspiracy with the wet/Stone and the unwieldly images of the squinting heart./Once more, as before, I remember not to forget’, and comments: ‘The poem is indeed one of public “conspiracy”, but it is a conspiracy with the reader against certain perceived imperatives of place and situation.’ [195]; ‘What is probably Mahon’s best-known poem, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”, is essentially a sustained meditation on “lost lives” and a muted insistence on the self’s having to be “born again” in order to live them.’ [201].

He also quotes Tom Paulin (Intro. to Oxford Poliotical Poetry), writing on Mahon: ‘Such poems issue from the condition of supremely unillusioned quietism – the wisest of passivities – which is usually the product of bitter historical experience and which is temperamentally different from disillusion. To be politically disillusioned is often to be cynical; to be politically apethetic is usually to be ignorant, but to possess no illusions is to understand a spiritual reality which is religious in its negativity.’ (Intro. p.51.; here p.202)

Terry Eagleton, criticised Paul Muldoon’s Quoof by way of example: ‘the poem trades entirely on the intricinsic interest of its material rather than on any imaginative transformation it submits them to. It is sentimentalism to believe that memories are valuable in themselves. To the writer of regional memories it is often enough a way of evading struggle with meaning, for such lovingly preserved experiences seem deceptively meaningful in themselves, and the act of narrating them assumes an auratic [sic] significance for which it has not sufficiently paid.’ (‘New Poetry’, in Stand, 25, 3, Summer 1984, pp.76-80; cited in Dawe, op. cit,. p.34.
 ‘The poetry of Padraic Fiacc, Thomas Kinsella and Derek Mahon as well as some of their younger contemporaries such as Paul Durcan, demonstrates a relative freedom from the kind of public conformations and conventions that I have noted briefly in the poetry of John Montague, Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin. The poetic fruits of this freedom are found in the poet’s own ironic, critical and questioning relationship with the details of his individual experience, feelings and ideas, and how rigorously these are probed and developed in the poetry. This is a valuable, if sometimes obscured, development: an imaginative negotiation that takes into account the Ireland we actually live in and the image poetry presents of it, along with all the others things that a poet needs to imagine.’ (End; p.41.)

MacNeice: ‘When we got home we would have tea in the nursery, strong tea thick with sugar, and sometimes before we went to bed, Miss Craig, for a treat, would give us thick beef sandwiches with mustard or a cold drink made of cream of tartar. Possibly our diet, though it was the cause, was one of the conditions of my dreams. These got worse and worse. Where earlier I had had dreams of being chased by mowing-machines or falling into machinery or arguing with tigers who wanted to eat me I now was tormented by something much less definte, much more serious ... a grey monotonous rhythm which drew me in towards a centre as if there were a sider at the centre drawing in his thread and everything else were unreal. (The Strings are False, q.p.; here p.82.)

‘What haunts MacNeice’s poetry is what is strangely absent from The Strings are False - his willingness to find out what lies in the corner of his mind: the dormant, flawed and mysterious feelings that pervade his poems.’ (p.82).

[On the Dublin literati:] ‘they hardly mentioned the war but debated the correct versions of Dublin street songs.’ (SAF, q.p.; here 83).

‘Man cannot live by courage, technique, imagination - alone. He has to have a sanction from outside himself. Otherwise his technical achievements, his empires of stocks and shares, his exploitation of power, his sexual conquests, all his apparent inroads on the world outside, are merely the self-assertion, the self-indulgence, of a limited self that whimpers behind the curtains, a spiritual masturbation.’ (ibid., q.p.; here p.85).

‘Man is essentially weak and he wants power; essentially lonely, he creates familiar daemons, Impossible Shes, and bonds - of race and creed - where no bonds are. He cannot lie by bread or Marx alone; he must always be after the Grail.’ (Ibid; here 86.)

Quotes Michael Longley, ‘My Protestant Education’, New Statesman, 10 Aug. 1974, p.219: ‘The grammar school I moved on to had enjoyed a radical reputation in the 19th century and it remained a tolerant and pleasantly secular place. There I encountered that tough scepticism and disenchanted liberalism with which many educated and moderate Protestants who cannot accept either Nationalism or diehard Unionism fill the vacuum - qualities which have been most deeply articulated in the imagination of Louis MacNeice.’ (Quoted in Dawe, op. cit., p.154.)

Quotes Stan Smith on the Ulster poem, which he defines facetiously as ‘tragical-comical-elegiacal-pastoral’: ‘... a poetry that looks back to the sceptical Protestant tradition of Louis MacNeice [and] takes up a worried, disapproving but finally uncomprehending stance towards an experience with which it feels no sense of affinity [...] It makes a show of being terse, but is often wordy, even sententious. It performs its civil [sic] duties equitably, by reflecting, in an abstracted kind of way, on violence, but its hands are indubitably clean. It speaks, at times, with the tone of a shell-shocked Georgianism that could easily be mistaken for indifference before the ugly realities of life, and death, in Ulster; at times, with the true voice of the pastoral: it bleats. [...] sheepishly, it looks back to Louis MacNeice as its literary progenitor, like Derek Mahon in “Carrowdore Churchyard” [...]; and it seeks to reproduce “Each fragile, resolving ambiguity” of that older and more troubled poet.’ (Stan Smith, ‘At One Remove’, review of Mahon’s Sel. Poems 1962-1978 and Longley’s Echo Gate with Harmon’s Irish Poetry After Yeats, in Literary Review, No. 22, 8 Aug., 1980, p.11; rep. in Inviolable Voice: History and Twentieth-Century Poetry, Gill & Macmillan 1982, p.189 [on Mahon, pp.188-93]; here 165-66;

Bibl. also quoted [with variants] in Joris Duytschaever, ‘History in the Poetry of Derek Mahon’, in Duytschaever and Geert Lernout, eds., History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature, Amsterdam: Rodopi 1988, pp.97-109, p.98. Note that the last is an attempt to ‘straighten out Smith’s messy argument’ in the light of Benjamin’s ideas quoted in it.] Further: John Goodby offers an extended critique of what he calls Smith’s ‘extraordinary and very English lapse’ in reading Mahon’s “literariness” as a ‘recurrent technique for putting a distance between the middle-class self and its panic’; in Goodby, ‘Reading Protestant Writing’, as infra., p.224, n.10 [p.284].

Quotes Longley: ‘Though we deny them name and birth./Locked out from rhyme and lexicon/The ghosts still gather round our hearth/Whose bed and board makes up the whole -/Thief, murderer and clown - icon/And lares of the poet’s soul.’ (”To Derek Mahon”, re-entitled “Birthmarks”, in Poems 1963-1983, p.58; here 167; but see true title, in Longley, ‘Empty Holes [... &c.]’, IUR, 1994, infra.)

Rep. in Against Piety, p.169ff: Quotes Douglas Dunn: ‘A year or so ago Andrew Waterman wrote about Northern Irish poetry with that disagreeable English complacency against which MacDiarmid heckled for more than fifty years. Ulster, said Mr Waterman ... has a population and incidence of talent similar to, say, Coventry plus Wolverhampton’. Complacency and malice often go hand in hand; the latter is supposed to be excused by the former, not not having thought very hard about what is being considered. It is a state of mind which calculates exactly a means by [85] which mistaken assumptions and real blunders are not only disguised but perpetuated in the name of doing someone a disservice. “Ulster”, says Mr Waterman, “is saddled by history with a need to affect cultural “nationhood”. Why is that intended to be a derogatory remark? Mr Waterman is not able to ask the question Why. He has failed to notice that resistance to English cultural hegemony is among the determining factors of the work of, say, Seamus Heaney. / Mr Waterman’s attitude is one which would question the idea of an anthology of Northern Ireland poets. That is why I have referred to his article ‘Ulsterectomy’ His view are characteristic of present-day English deracination. “A writer born here”, he says, “or elsewhere in Ireland, suffers from the further contrainst of being expected to define exactly where he stands in relation to some or other concept of nationalism and cultural allegiance...’. Fortunately, he says, English writers are free of that - and I think he means they are above it, or that it is beneath them. But is it not an advantagne to a writer to be obliged to define himself against issues which involve the larger numbers instead of the mere models of self? In any case, have Heaney, Mahon, Longley, Paulin and others been as predictably “exact” in performing these definitions as he says? [/...]. No one espaces from history, or place, or nationality, and to try to do so into a theoretical Britishness probably makes the predicament of nationality worse.’ (Review of Ormsby, Poets from the North of Ireland, Blackstaff; in The Honest Ulsterman, No. 64, Sept. 1979/Jan. 1980, pp.85-88; pp.85-86. [Note Edna Longley’s reference to Andrew Waterman’s hysterical “Ulsterectomy” and the relieved response to it in some quarters ...’, in ‘Stars and Horses, Pigs and Trees’, The Crane Bag, 3, 2, 1979, p.474.]

‘From Some of Mahon’s poems, and Seamus Heaney’s, it is not only a question of “belonging” but of making escapes through the trap doors of poetry itself.’ (p.88.)

Quotes Roy McFadden: ‘Those who have lost a country, with a wound / In place of patria, can sail like winds / Among the isalnds and the continents/Flying, if any, only personal flags ...’ (”First Letter to an Irish Novelist”; here p.87.)