Derek Mahon: Commentary

The Mahon Archive

James Liddy, ‘Irish Poets and the Protestant Muse’, in Eire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish studies, 14, 2 (Summer 1979), pp.118-[28]. Quotes Kavanagh on Ulster poets: ‘As for the “Ulster” writers who comprise only the Six Counties writers, they seem to be insipid, colourless and with no particular regional flavour.’ (“Diary”, Envoy, 1, 2, Jan. 1950, p.85; here p.121.); also quotes MacNeice, ‘This land may seem a dreamland, an escape, / But to her sons and even more her daughters / A dream from which they yearn to wake; the liner / Outhoots the owls of the past.’ (Brown and Reid, Time Was Away, Dublin 1974, p.2; here p.121.) Bibl., John Montague, ‘Regionalism into Reconciliation: The Poetry of John Hewitt’, in Poetry Ireland, 3 (Spring 1964), p.113; also Cahal Daly, Violence in Ireland (Dublin 1973), p.155 [‘The Ulster myth ... ignored the existence within its own State and territory of nearly half a million people, more than a third of its population, whose home had always been Ulster, but an Ulster totally differently understood, totally otherwise loved.’]; here p.124.)

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John Byrne, ‘Derek Mahon: A Commitment to Change’, Crane Bag, 6, 1 (1982), pp.62-72: Quotes Mahon in Sphere Book of Modern Irish Poetry: ‘Their assumptions and credulities were those of the Irish country people of the time: and the Irish, for many years, returned the poets’ reverence with reverence for a poetry which evaded the metaphysical unease in which all poetry of lasting value has its source.’ (p.12; here p.62; also in Kathleen Shields, ‘Derek Mahon’s Nerval’, in Translation as Literature, 2, 1, 1995, pp.60-73, p.62; as infra.)

John Byrne [cont.] quotes Seamus Deane: ‘Mahon is evasive, not because he avoids feelings, but because he passes through them quickly. However saturated he may be in them, he is careful that whatever tear is squeezed out in a poem will have a deprecatory highlight glistening within it. He goes into dangerous areas, but in a fast car, not on foot.’ (‘Irish Poetry and Irish Nationalism’, in Dunn, ed., Two Decades of Irish Writing: A Critical Survey, 1975, p.12; here p.63.).

John Byrne [cont.] - quotes Mahon: ‘Battles have to be fought and lost, but a war remains to be won. The war I mean is not, of course, between Protestant and Catholic but between the fluidity of a possible life (poetry is a great lubricant) and the rigor mortis of archaic postures, political and cultural. The poets themselves have taken no part in political events, but they have contributed to that possible life, or the possibility of that possible life; for the act of writing is itself political in the fullest sense. A good poem is a paradigm of good politics - of people talking to each other, with honest subtlety, at a profound level. It is a light to lighten the darkness; and we have darkness enough, God knows, for a long time.’ (From ‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’, in Twentieth-Century Studies, No. 4, Nov. 1970, p.93.

John Byrne [cont.] on Mahon: ‘The suburbs of Belfast have a peculiar relationship to the Irish cultural situation in as much as there the final anathema for the traditional Irish imagination. A lot of people who are regarded as important in Irish poetry cannot accept that the Protestant suburbs in Belfast are part of Ireland, you know. At an aesthetic level they can’t accept that.’ (Interview with Harriet Cooke, The Irish Times, 17 Jan. 1973; Byrne, p.67.) Byrne’s essay invokes the idea that for Mahon poetry is ‘magical and efficacious.’

[Note that Byrne speaks of Mahon’s; ‘constant readiness to discern “the halo round a frying pan” in Vladimir Nabokov’s phrase, and elicits Mahon recognition and approval. Further, ‘Mahon is responsive to the imaginative potential in the ordinary’and concrete." (Available at JSTOR - online.)

D. E. S. Maxwell, ‘Contemporary Poetry in Northern Ireland’, in Douglas Dunn, ed., Two Decades of Irish Writing (Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire: Carcanet 1975): ‘The life of Mahon’s poems is endlessly mobile, annexing points d’appui from teasing essence into some endurable form: “An eddy of semantic scruple / In an unstructurable sea”. Water - the sea, rivers, coastlines - the flight of birds, refractions of light, cities giving upon country views: all represent the mutability which defies, yet with its [181] rhythmical patterns provokes, the human urge for an equilibrium, like a climate, into unpredictable elements.’ (pp.181-82.)

Declan Kiberd, review of Poems 1962-1978, in Irish University Review, 12, 1 (1982), p.109: calls “A Disused Shed” ‘arguably the finest poem to come out of Ireland in the past twenty years’. Note also, review of Poems 1962-1978, in Irish University Review, 12, 1 (1982), p.109, calling “A Disused Shed” ‘arguably the finest poem to come out of Ireland in the past twenty years’ (p.109).

John Willett [letter to the Editor], Times Literary Supplement (13 May 1983), p.489: vehemently disagrees that Mahon’s version of “Brecht in Svendorg” as inadequate to the original poet. (; cited in Peter McDonald, ‘Louis MacNeice’s Posterity’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, LIX, 3, Spring 1998, pp.376-97, p.97, ftn. 5 [p.101]).

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Brendan Kennelly, ‘Derek Mahon’s Humane Perspective’, in Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Irish Poetry, ed. Terence Brown & Nicholas Grene, Macmillan 1989, pp.143-52; rep. in Journey into Joy: Selected Prose, ed. Äke Persson (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994): ‘Mahon is a true wit. There is an element of cruelty in his perception and in his precision but there is no lack of compassion. It is a complex wit: sceptical, ironic, nostalgic, funny, philosophical, micky-taking, impudent, lonely, relishing the absurd and the lyrical simultaneously.’ (p.133.) Further: ‘But one of the problems for this kind of writer, for an ironic, romantic, sceptical, witty, nostalgic humanist is what I shall call the problem of yourself. What are you to do with yourself? Where does “self” stand in the poem? Where is Mahon in his poetry? I said he is a poet of the perimeter, meditating on the centre, with a mixture of amusement and pain. He is not, or he is very rarely, at the centre of his poems. He has a modesty, a kind of good manners of the imagination which nearly always prevents him from indulging in any form of Whitmanesque self-exhibitionism. So how then does he actually say things? How does the peripheral stance convey a central statement?’ (p.133.). Kennelly answers that he ‘invokes the help of other poets, other poems’, a device called ‘imaginative indirectness ... not being candid, not being totally direct to anyone’; quotes “The Poet in Residence (after Corbière)”, calling it ‘Mahon’s best poem’ (p.134.)

Eamon Grennan: ‘The strangest impression made on me when I read any poem by Derek Mahon is the sense that I have been spoken to: that the poem has established its presence in the world as a kind of speech. In addition, [113] I am aware that its status as speech is an important value in itself, carrying and confirming those other, more explicit values which the poem endorses as part of its overt “meaning”. What I hear in these poems is a firm commitment to the act of civil communication enlivened, in this case, by poetic craft.’ (‘“To the Point of Speech”: The Poetry of Derek Mahon’, in ed. James D. Brophy & Raymond J. Porter, eds., Contemporary Irish Writing, Boston: Iona College Press, 1983, p.15; cited in Racz, op. cit., 1993, pp.113-14.) [See also Grennan’s 1991 interview with Mahon - as attached.]

Tom Paulin, ‘A Terminal Ironist’, in Ireland and the English Crisis (Bloodaxe 1984), pp.55-59. ’Mahon identifies with the unreconciled and the damned, and often there is a quality of still anguish in the bitter clarity and detachment of his work. Against and again he returns to motifs of silence, exile, utter clear-eyed despair, and version of the artistic life. What he celebrates - and it’s a celebration conducted in a temperature of absolute zero - is the perfection of art, the intense quidditas which exists outside history. [...] And he rejects any insistence that art should be socially relevant or politically committed’ (p.57.) ‘In order to arrive at his vision of art - “Our afterlives a comeing true/Of perfect worlds we never knew” - Mahon takes the negative way ... rejection of sense experience’ [quotes ‘... the voice is audible only to those/whose hearts are emptied of property and desire.’(”The Voice”, Three Poems after Jaccottet; here p.57).

Tom Paulin, ‘A Terminal Ironist’ (1984) - cont.: ‘And in some ways Mahon resembles George Herbet who characteristically creates a perfect poem which also abolishes itself in the last line ... Herbert’s poems set themselves aside in order to merge with the absolute reality of God, whole Mahon’s slip into the utter perfection of Art. Paradoxically, therefore, Mahon’s work possesses an extraordinary humility - at the last moment his non serviam modulates into the finest idea of service. And perhaps his aestheticism has parallels with the dedicated fanaticism of a hunger striker [...]’ (p.57.)

Further (Paulin on Mahon:) ‘And in some ways Mahon resembles George Herbert who characteristically creates a perfect poem which also abolishes itself in the last line ... Paulin notes that in dropping the ded. of “Glengormley” to Padraic Fiacc in Night-crossing, Mahon eludes the ‘complex historical and personal bitterness’ of the other poet. (ftn., p.57.)

Tom Paulin - letter in response to review by John Redmond [as infra] - [...] “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” is a poem which is revered - revered and held sacred - by many writers and readers. It is a modern classic, one of those permanent and immortal works of art which leave one breathless with admiration (I will never forget the day in September 1973, when I first read it in the Listener). Beside Mahon’s masterpiece, Larkin’s “Church Going” and “The Whitsun Weddings’ look slightly parochial and awkward. Among other historical subjects, Mahon”s poem, which dates from early in the Troubles, gives a voice to the victims of political violence - violence which a substantial section of Ulster Unionism is trying to ensure continues. The relation of Northern Ireland’s political tragedy to Mahon’s art ought to have featured in Redmond’s review - and he ought properly to have praised a poem which many readers agree is one of the greatest poems in English since Yeats." (LRB, Issue of 8 March 2001; available as attached.)

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Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature (London: Faber 1984): ‘Many Irish writers, sensitive to the threat of provincialism, have tried to compensate for it by being as cosmopolitan as possible. In consequence, they become citizens of the world by profession. Denis Devlin and Sean O’Faolain are two outstanding examples. For them, the cultivation of the intellect is not only a goal in itself but also a means of escape from besieged and rancorous origins. Others - Joyce, Beckett, Francis Stuart, Louis MacNeice - although they also seek in the world beyond an alternative to their native culture, have come to regard their exile from it as a generic feature of the artist’s rootless plight rather than a specifically Irish form of alienation. / Derek Mahon occupies a middle ground between these choices.’ (p.156; quoted by Istvan D. Racz, ‘Mask Lyrics in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon and Derek Mahon’, in Donald E. Morse, et al., eds., A Small Nation’s Contribution to the World, Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1993, pp.107-18, p.113.) [Cont.]

Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature (London: Faber 1984) - cont.: ‘Mahon has here [in ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’] inverted his usual procedure. The lost lives are not lived beyond history, but before it. Their fulfilment is in history. This is a conceit and a figure in which he captures the central significance of his opening poem, “Afterlives”. In one sense, he is saying that the only life which can produce art is one that is engaged with history, even (especially?) if it is the history of the victims, the lost, the forgotten.’ (Deane, p.163; Racz, p.116.) [See longer quotations from Celtic Revivals - as attached.)

Seamus Deane, ‘The Artist and the Troubles’, in Ireland and the Arts, ed. T. P. Coogan [Special Issue of Literary Review] (London: Namara Press 1984), pp.43-50: ‘[...] Derek Mahon, a natural cosmopolitan, adopted a pose of such mandarin disengagement in his work that it seemed to some he had deliberately chosen stylishness as a defence against the risks of commitment. But Mahon’s work has refuted this notion. In his poetry we hear the note of rather weary disaffection which had been so prominent in the work of one of his mentors, Louis MacNeice, blended with grief at the prospect of the wasteland of lost causes which the North and so much else had become. Mahon transposes the customary inspection of the roots of the past into an [47] inspection of the debris of the future - which is itself the past in its completed form.’ (pp.46-47.)

Seamus Deane: ‘Irish Poetry and Irish Nationalism’ (1975): ‘Mahon is evasive, not because he avoids feelings, but because he passes through them quickly. However saturated he may be in them, he is careful that whatever tear is squeezed out in a poem will have a deprecatory highlight glistening within it. He goes into dangerous areas, but in a fast car, not on foot.’ (In Dunn, ed., Two Decades of Irish Writing: A Critical Survey, 1975, p.12; quoted in John Byrne, ‘Derek Mahon: A Commitment to Change’, in Crane Bag, 6, 1 (1982), pp.62-72; p.63.)

Note: John Redmond writes - ‘As Seamus Deane has pointed out, Mahon’s poems are neither conceptual nor sensual but equidistant from both. ’ (See Redmond, ‘Perish the Thought’, review of Selected Poems, in London Review of Books (8 Feb. 2001) [as attached].

Maurice Riordan, ‘An Urbane Perspective: The Poetry of Derek Mahon’, in The Irish Writer and the City, ed. Maurice Harmon [IASIL Conf. Papers] (Gerrard’s Cross: Smythe 1984): ‘The disused shed is also a version of Plato’s cave, and the loss expressed is metaphorical: “Let the god not abandon us / Who have come so far in darkness and in pain”. Ultimately, the poem speaks perhaps for all that is supressed in consciousness, for those impulses, desires, instincts, which, denied the light of actuality for whatever historical reasons, maintain their own weird and secret life. The poem, then, would seem to suggest a confrontation between the civilised self, the “we” of the poem (“You with your light meter and relaxed intinerary”) and the repressed self, what the civilised mind has denied.’ (p.173; styled ‘the correct analysis’ in comparison with Deane, 1984, supra; Racz, op. cit., 1993, p.117.)

Seamus Heaney, ‘Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland’ [Peter Laver Grasmere Lect., Aug. 1984], rep. in Andrews, ed., Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays (London: Macmillan 1996), pp.124-44 [rep. in Finders Keepers, 2001, pp.114-33]: Heaney comments on Mahon’s ‘beautifully orchestrated’ poem “Disused Shed [...; &c.]” ‘where it is not just a single life that is given voice, but a whole Lethe full of doomed generations and tribes, whispering their unfulfilment and perplexed hopes in a trickle of masonry, pleading for a hearing in the great soft gestures of mushroom growths that strain from the dark towards a guiding start of light in a keyhole.’ [Cont.]

[Cont. - quotes the last two stanzas:] ‘This could be called visionary or symbolic: it is about the need to live and be known, the need for selfhood, recognition in the eye of God and the eye of the world, and its music is cello and homesick. A great sense of historical cycles, of injustice and catastrophe, looms at the back of the poem’s mind.’ (p.131; see note on alterations in Finders-Keepers, 2002 - infra.)

Note: the phrase ‘could be called visionary or symbolic’ (Elmer Andrews, op. cit., p.131) is deleted from the version of Heaney’s article reprinted in Finders Keepers, 2002 (p.120), while the phrase ‘political and ethnic glamour’ is replaced by ‘political and ethnic solidarity’ (Ibid., p.123) [my itals.], while the rest of the sentence remaining the same. [For longer extracts, see attached.)

Further: ‘I do not [var. ‘don ‘t’, in Finders Keepers, 2001, p.123] want to reduce Derek Mahon’s poems to this single theme of alienated distance, for his work also abounds in poems where the social voice is up and away on the back of Pegasus, cutting a dash through the usual life of back-kitchens and bar counters, but I would nevertheless [deleted in FK, 2001] insist that I am not forcing his work to fit a thesis. It is present in all his books, this dominant mood of being on the outside (where one has laboured spiritually to arrive) only to end up looking back nostalgically at what one knows are well-nigh intolerable conditions on the inside . The mood ... of his best poems ... [is] as rinsed of political and ethnic glamour as a haiku by Baso, but their purely poetic achievement is further enriched when we view them against the political and ethnic background of Mahon’s origins.’ (p.135; see note on alterations in Finders Keepers, 2002 - infra.)

[Note: In Finders Keepers, 2002, the final sentence following ‘inside’ - is thus altered: ‘It is treated in a number of his best poems, which dwell on the sufferings of those he called in an early poem “the unreconciled in their metaphysical pain”. These poems of the displaced consciousness are as rinsed of political and ethnic solidarity [sic] as a haiku by Basho, but their purely poetic achievement ...; &c.]’ (p.123.)

Seamus Heaney, ‘Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland’, rep. in Finders Keepers, 2001, pp.114-33: ‘[but] Penshurst Place is only one part of the [123] poem’s life. Its underlife, its shadow elsewhere, is the Ulster of hillforts, cattle-raids, and rain-sodden gallowglasses where Hugh O’Neill was born [...] “Penshurst Place”, then, contains Mahon’s sense of bilocation, culturally in love with the Surrey countryside where he was living with his family when this poem was written, but domestically and politically entangled with the country of his first nurture.’ (pp.122-23.)

Further: ‘Penshurst Place [...] focuses [134] Mahon’s sense of bilocation’ (Andrews, ed., Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry, 1996, pp.134-35); further, ‘Mahon’s displaced angle of vision is not a Nelson-like ploy to avoid seeing what he prefers not to see but a way of focusing afresh.’ (Ibid., p.137.)

Note that Mahon is the dedicatee of several poems by Heaney incl. “Chekhov on Sakhalin” in Station Island, 1984; rep. Opened Ground, 1998, pp.215-16.)

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Gerald Dawe, ‘Icons and Lares: Derek Mahon and Michael Longley’, in Across a Roaring Hill, ed. Dawe & Edna Longley (Belfast: Blackstaff 1985): ‘[Michael] Longley, I would suggest, has accepted his past (the Protestant city, the cultural “duality”, the shaky identity), whereas Mahon rejected his. MacNeice’s spiritual sons have gone their different ways: one has remained at home, the other has left.’ (op. cit., p.227; cited in Istvan D. Racz, ‘Mask Lyrics in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon and Derek Mahon’, in Donald E. Morse, et al., eds., A Small Nation’s Contribution to the World, Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1993, pp.107-18, p.113.) [For longer extracts, see under Dawe - as attached.]

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Joris Duytschaever, ‘History in the Poetry of Derek Mahon’, in Duytschaever & Geert Lernout, eds., History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature [Conference of 9 April 1986; Costerus Ser. Vol. 71] (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1988), pp.97-109, challenges Stan Smith’s rubbishing of the Ulster poem and especially his critique of Derek Mahon’s supposed refusal of Benjamin’s perception of the concept of history. Of Benjamin, Duytschaever says, ‘The “Thesis” are a desperate attempt to reconcile materialism and Jewish mysticism by discovering in the latter enough messianic drive to sustain the flawed spirit of the former in a period of danger and impending doom.’ (p.100). He continues: ‘In other words, Benjamin reactions agaisn the ideoalogy of linear progress which is not equipped to deal with throwbacks: he implies that it would be preferable to take the catastrophe as a historical norm instead. On the other hand, however, Benjamin and Mahon share a basic desire to rescue and redeem whatever is worth saving in the world and in history, albeit often unrecognised by the “compact majority” as vitally 100] important for the survival of mankind or even entirely abandonded as a lost cause.’ (pp.100-01.) Quotes amply from “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”.

Edna Longley, ‘Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland’, in Crane Bag, 9, 1 (1985), pp.26-40; rep. as Do., in Poetry in the Wars (Bloodaxe 1986), pp.185-210, here p.33.), [Offers comparison with the nationalist politics of Seamus Heaney’s poetry.] ‘Mahon insists on the poet serving humanity in his own terms. He should feel, but resist, the contrary pressure that would make him in the image of the people ... Since poetry cannot be the “creature” of politics, Unionist and Republican ideologies are equally off the map. Mahon also sloughs off the liberal-humanist socialism that MacNeice could espouse, without undue artistic compromise, during the thirties: ‘What middle-class cunts we are / [... &c.] (”Afterlives”).’ Further, ‘[P]oets make their long-term contribution by refusing to betray ‘semantic scruple’ in a country of unscrupulous rhetoricians, where names break bones, where careless talk costs lives.’ (p.39.)

Edna Longley, ‘“When Did You Last See Your Father?”: Perceptions of the Past in Northern Irish Writing 1965-1985’, in The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994): ‘Mahon’s historical consciousness, as guilty and punitive as Beckett’s, not only turns biblical Protestantism inside out, but contradicts Whig history and deplores Belfast’s industrial history. His poetry denies progress, views the rise of the bourgeoisie as a descent into “barbarism”, and cries woe to a houseproud “civilisation”’. (p.161).

William Wilson, ‘A Theoptic Eye: Derek Mahon and The Hunt by Night’, in Éire-Ireland, 25, 4 (1990), pp.120-31 - Quotes Seamus Heaney: ‘Mahon, the poet of metropolitan allusion, of ironical and cultivated manners, is being shadowed' [q.source]. Further, ‘[Yet] I wonder to what degree we should credit the priority of place over history in Mahon’s poetry. The poe[m]s about the politicised landscape of Ulster are generally bitter, when they are not pluterperfectly ironical. And, in many of his poems set outside Northern Ireland, the regnant spatial specificity is frequently contradicted by a discernible poetic gesture situating these placess outside the margin of reality. That is, whether Mahon’s preferred place is an autonomous imaginative space or an actual setting removed from ruined Ulster, its significance and consolation invariably deconstruct.’ (here p.122.) Wilson focuses on “Lighthouse in Maine” and as various instances of spatial-spiritual thinking. (122). Quotes “Thinking of Inishere in Cambridge, Massachusetts”: ‘A dream of limestone in sea light / Where gulls have placed their perfect prints. / Reflection in that final sky / Shames vision into simple sight: / Into pure sense, experience. // Atlantic leagues away tonight, / Conceived beyond such innocence, / I clutch the memory still, and I / Have measured everything with it since.’ (Poems 1963-1978, p.27; here p.123.) Also “On Spring Vacation”: ‘One part of my mind must learn to know its place. / The things that happen in the kitchen houses / And echoing back-streets of this desperate city / Ashould engage more than my casual interest, / Exact more interest than my casual pity.’ (Poems 1962-1978, p.4.)

John Hufstader, ‘Derek Mahon: Tongues of Water, Teeth of Stones’[, in] Northern Irish Poetry and Social Violence (Kentucky UP 1999), pp.111-37: ‘Mahon thus bears witness to a split, in Kohut’s terms, between the grandiose escapist self and the idealizing conformist self, such that the former can only conceive of itself in archaic terms, the world of the present having been fully occupied by a repressive culture of parental standards. ... Mahon will play Stephen [Dedalus]’s car, attempting to transcend Ulster paradoxes by flight into a more liberal environment, but will discover that he cannot so easily escape the fundamental problem of social hostility. / Many of Mahon’s best poems may be read as artistic strategies for resolving this problem of identity.’ (p.113.)

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Hugh Haughton, ‘“Even now there are places where a thought might grow”: Places and Displacement in the Poetry of Derek Mahon’, in Neil Corcoran, ed., The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland (Brigend, Mid Glamorgan: Seren Books; Dufour 1992), pp.87-122, takes issue with the insistence that Mahon is absorbed in a debate over nation and ‘place’. Considers Deane to overstate the importance of the Belfast urbs on Mahon’s urbanity in the light of his own insistence on the importance of background, and reads Mahon’ line, ‘one part of my mind should know its place’ with a new emphasis on ‘one part’. Coins or uses the phrase ‘theoptic’. (p.87.) Further, ‘he [Mahon] suggests that Northern poets from Protestant backgrounds are not primarily concerned with Ireland as “a distinct cultural entity” but aware instead of “a diffuse and fortuitous assembly of Irish, British and American models” [Twentieth Century Studies]. “In this”, he says, quoting a displaced and Anglicised American, they are “true to their dissociated sensibilities”. Where Eliot, “disociated sensibility”, a legacy in part of the English Civil War, was a pathological condition, for Mahon caught in a political situation approaching that of civil war, it is a stimulus and even, I suspect, a vocation. [...] Being caught between cultures is the common predicament of the modern intellectual - and perhaps almost everybody else too. Mahon’s intense awareness of that has helped make him one of the most bracing and original poets now writing in English.’ (p.91.) [Note Haughton review, infra.]

Richard York, ‘Derek Mahon as Translator’, in Rivista Alicantian de Estudios Ingleses, 5 (1992), pp.163-81: ‘The major feature of the recreative translations is their comic exuberance, [white] playfulness. The point is especially obvious in “The Mute Phenomena”, which reads almost like a parody of the original, which itself is far from comic, and shows little concern for word-for-word loyalty to the original, or even loyality to its overall tone.’ Quotes: ‘Homme, libre penseur! Te crois-tu seul pensant / Dans ce monde où la vie éclate en toute chose?’, and cf., ‘Your great mistake is to disregard the satire / Bandied among the mute phenomena.’ [p.167] Bibl., George Watson, ‘The Narrow Ground’, in Masaru Sekine, ed, Irish Writers and Society at Large, 1985, pp.207-24; A. E. Guinness, ‘Cast[e] a Wary Eye: Derek Mahon’s Classical Perspective’, in Yearbook of English Studies (1987), pp.124-142; see also Richard York, ‘Louis MacNeice and Derek Mahon’, in Louis MacNeice and his Influence (Colin Smythe 1998), pp.85-98.

Terence Brown, ‘Derek Mahon: The Poet and Painting’, in Irish University Review, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 1994), pp. 38-50. ‘Light plays a crucial part in the imaginative world of Derek Mahon’s poetry. He is, in fact, a markedly visual poet, one who attends patiently, even contemplatively, to the look of things and especially to the way light falls on them.’ (Opening sentence [p.i]). ... He is moved too by the moment when light breaks in darkness, when shadow suddenly releases its hold on the mind. Dawn is his prime time, particularly in the washed light after the storm at sea as a northern coast awakens to a transfigured world.’ [ibid.; ...]

Terence Brown (‘Derek Mahon ... and Painting’, Irish University Review, 1994) - cont.: ‘Mahon is attentive also to the act of seeing. There is visual self-consciousness in much of his poetry as if he is intent on watching himself and others watching the world through eyes that know light is a kind of artist which composes landscapes and city scapes, still life interiors, as it falls on sea and light on street and table.’ [p.ii]. Moved as he is by light and its effects, conscious of seeing as a mode of ordering ordinary reality, art and painting plays a more important role in Mahon’s oeuvre than simply offering occasional subject matter (and fairly frequently passing allusion).’ [p.iii]. Further: ‘For Mahon too is absorbed by the way light falls on the visible world to invest it with numinous presence and an impression of inherent relationships. [p.iv.] Accordingly it is in his poems on paintings that he confronts in a direct way an issue that troubles him throughout all his work - that is whether the composed achievement of art may be an illusory misrepresentation of the real for all its beauty.’ [p.v]. In Mahon’s world it is human suffering and violence that offer the most disturbing challenges to the aesthetic.’ [p.viii.] (Available at JSTOR - online.

Terence Brown - various remarks on Derek Mahon

‘[The poetry of Derek Mahon has developed] out of a sense of complex aesthetically uninspiring tensions of Northern Ireland middle-class Protestant identity’. (Northern Voices, Poets From Ulster (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1975, p.192.)

‘The dark shadows of that County Antrim rectory remain to haunt a mind ready to salute an Ireland that could now somehow represent psychological release and spiritual intimations.’ (‘Louis MacNeice’s Ireland’, in Brown & Nicholas Grene, eds., Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Irish Poetry (London: Macmillan 1989), pp.92-93.

Terence Brown instances the “Light Music” sequence and “A Garage in Co. Cork” as poems by Mahon where ‘his own secular mysticism finds expression.’ (Introduction, Journalism of Derek Mahon, 1996, p.19).

Note: The phrase ‘secular mystic’ which Mahon applied to Phillipe Jaccottet and which Terence Brown applied to Mahon by returns was first applied to Mahon by Douglas Dunn, as William Scammell recalls. (See Scammell, ‘Derek Mahon Interviewed’, in Poetry Review, Summer 1991, p.6. The reference appears to be to Douglas Dunn, ‘Let God not Abandon Us: On the Poetry of Derek Mahon’, Stone Ferry Review (Winter 1978), pp.7-30. [BS].

Note: The foregoing remarks and comments are extracted from Bruce Stewart [Ricorso], ‘Solving Ambiguity’: The Secular Mysticism of Derek Mahon’, in Derek Mahon: A Collection of Critical Essay, ed. Elmer Andrews (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 2001), pp.29-52.

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Brian Donnelly, intro. to Irish University Review, ‘Derek Mahon Special Number’, 24, 1 (1994): ‘The Yeatsian ideal of rootedness and community that propelled Irish cultural history for most of the twentieth century has its antithesis in Mahon’s images of lost tribes and desolate headlands.’ (p.[ii]). Further: ‘Mahon’s sense of the bleakness of man’s condition is almost always counterpointed by his habit of glimpsing those fleeting moments when light or beauty flickers out of unlikely surroundings’ (idem; both quoted in John Constable, ‘Derek Mahon’s Development’, Chosen Ground [... &c.], ed. Neil Corcoran, 1992, pp.107-18.

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Kathleen Mullaney, ‘Derek Mahon’s Poetry’, in Tjebbe A. Westendrop & Jane Mallinson, eds., Politics and the Rhetoric of Poetry: Perspectives on Modern Anglo-Irish Poetry [The Literature of Politics, The Politics of Literature, Vol. 5] (Amstersdam: Rodopi 1995), pp.47-55. Bibl., Peter McDonald, ‘Louis MacNeice’s Posterity’, in Princeton University Library Chronicle, LIX, No. 3 (Spring 1998), pp.376-97; James McElroy, ‘Derek Mahon’s “Rage for Order”, in Northwest Review, Vol. 24, Pt. 1, 1986, pp.93-101; also, a letter of John Willett, Times Literary Supplement (13 May, 1983, p.489), vehemently disagreeing that Mahon’s version of “Brecht in Svendorg” as inadequate to the original poet. (Cited here, p.97, ftn. 5 [p.101]).

Colin Graham, ‘Derek Mahon’s Cultural Marginalia’, in Eve Patten, ed., Returning to Ourselves: Second Volume from the John Hewitt International Summer School (Lagan 1995), pp.240-48: ‘Mahon’s poetry can be placed at the intersection of what [Homi] Bhabha calls “the middle years” and the fin de siècle - not specific points in history but states of ideology, understanding and culture. The perceptible movement in Mahon’s poetry from centrality to marginality, played out on the imagined and real borders and the seashores is rehearse in “The Last Resort” (the title itself an Arnoldian stand against time) [... &c.] (p.246.)

Jon Stallworthy, ‘Fathers and Sons’ [on McNeice with Mahon, Longley, and Muldoon], in Bullán, 2, 1 (Summer 1995), pp1-15, espec., 11ff.: I think of Mahon’s “In Carrowdore Churchyard” as initiating the turn in MacNeice’s reputation. Long before his death he seemed an Irish poet to English readers, while for too many Irish readers he didn’t really belong to Ireland. Here, however, was a Irish poet [Mahon, following MacNeice] of the next generation claiming kinship not with the imperial Yeats or the rooted Kavanagh, but with a poet who seemed to take his text from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: [...] “I will try to fly those nets”’ (p.11.)

Scott Brewster, ‘A Residual Poetry: Heaney, Mahon and Hedgehog History’, in Irish University Review, 28, 1 (Spring/Summer 1998), pp.56-67: ‘[...] The text’s transit between universal and particular is a familiar aspect of Derek Mahon’s work, its collapsing of time-frames and perspectives, nondescript wastelands and emptiness constituting a blank page of history. He is regarded as the sophisticated cosmopolitan, his “local” attachment to Ireland mediated through eternal questions of aesthetic value. Despite the fascination with “a place of pure being which exists outside history”, however, in Mahon’s work writing and identity persist, somehow, somewhere, on the threshold of irrecoverable silence and loss. / Mahon’s terminal irony offers an extreme version of the benign yet anxious humanism that characterises Seamus Heaney’s poetry. Where Mahon’s poems inhabit discontinuous time and spaces, for Heaney the sedimented temporalities of place are only too palpable: the literal and metaphorical ground of Ireland groans under a weight of accumulated history. What connects both poets is an apparent tendency to subsume historical difference and rupture into an aesthetic continuum.’ (p.56.) ]See further under Seamus Heaney, Commentary, infra.]

Bibl. [Scott Brewster]: Douglas Dunn, ‘Manana is Now: New Poetry’, in Encounter, Nov., 75, pp.79-81; Blake Morrison, ‘An Expropriated Mycologist’, Times Literary Supplement, 15 Feb. 1980, p.168; Bill Tinley, ‘International Perspectives in the Poetry of Derek Mahon, Irish University Review, 21, 1 (Spring/Summer 1991), pp.106-17; Hugh Haughton, ‘“Even Now There are Places Where a Thought Might Grow”: Place and Displacement in the Poetry of Derek Mahon’, in Neil Corcoran, ed., The Chosen Ground: Essays in the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland (Brigend: Seren Books 1992), p.109; Stan Smith, Invoilable Voices: History and Twentieth Century Poetry (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1982), p.188 [‘the tone of shell-shocked Georgianism that could easily be mistaken for indifference before the ugly reality of life, and death, in Ulster’]; Ciaran Carson, ‘Escaped from the Massacre?’, review of Seamus Heaney, North, in Honest Ulsterman, 50 (1975), pp.184-85 [sic].

Alan Wall, ‘Derek Mahon’s Emblem Books’, in Agenda, 33, No.3-4 (1996), pp.165-75: ‘By drawing attention to its emblematic quality, I want only to point briefly to a certain charged iconic intensity, a quality reare enough in ontemporary verse to be celebrated when it occurs. There is in Mahon’s work an instructive imagery, an emblematics of the “topography” o the contemporary world - its politics, its slaughters and its relentless self-presentation.’ (p.165.) Further, ‘Mahon has the same fascination for the detritus of modernity as Baudelaire. They are both keen-eyed about what we dispose of and how articulate it can be about what we are. In negative images we often find the turh: there is a common ancestry to the words refuse and refusal. The poem about Ovid is Baudelairean in another sense too: for the French oet, antiquity and modernity are complementary. Antiquity is thus defined to give a percetible edge to our moderinty and one day our modernity may progress to antiquity too.’ (p.166); ‘There is a remarkable combination of lightness of touch and lapidary definitiveness too in the little edges of rhyme used whenever appropriate ... This is a sequence of metamorphoses (Ovidian in strength) between modernity and antiquity and it is carried out with remarkable skill and learning. (p.168); ‘[...] We come back near the end of the poem to Baudelaire and to Pascal [quotes: ‘... The cry at the heart / Of the artichoke, / The gaiety of atoms.’] Cf. Baudelaire, “Le Gouffre”: ‘En haut, en bas, partout, la profondeur, la grève, / Le silence, l’espace affreux et captivant ...’ (p.169).

Elmer Andrews, ‘The Poetry of Derek Mahon: “Places where a thought might grow”’, in Andrews, ed., Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays (London: Macmillan 1996), pp.235-309: ‘Lives is dedicated to Heaney, and may be read as a reply to the religious intensity with which Heaney pursues his self-identifications. Mahon’s secular, ironic intelligence dispel awe, forces the imagination to come up against practical necessity and mocks the notion of direction communion with the past. His anthropological habit of mind does not discover a landscape instinct with meaningful signs, but one littered with meaningless rubble [... &c.]’ (p.244.) [See longer extracts - as attached.]

Kathleen McCracken, ‘Homophrosyne, The French Element in the Poetry of Derek Mahon’, in Joseph McMinn, ed., The Internationalism of Irish Literature and Drama (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1992), pp.181-92: ‘[...] If the French element in Mahon’s poetry is part of a reaction against what he has called the “narcissistic provincialism” of much contemporary Irish literature, it is also part of his response to the religio-political sitation in the North of Ireland. Mahon’s preoccupation with the static surfaces of paintings, not to mention his predilection for imitative translation, may seem on a superficial level more avoidance techniques, intellectual evasions of public responsibility. Certainly allusion and transliteration distance a poem from the immediate and temporarl but neither precludes complete segregation from the world of “fire and sword’. History, Mahon is aware, cannot be escaped; it will and must obtrude if the poems is to have permanent value. How his [187] versions of the French are connected to his admission and to his ostensibly ambiguous attitude towards the ׆troubles” is, I think, worth considering.’ (pp.187-88.)

Kathleen McCracken, ‘the French Element in the Poetry of Derek Mahon’ (1992) - cont.: ‘Mahon’s French imitations and borrowings are one way of expressing the cultural alienation experienced by the contemporary Northern Irish poet. As political statements they declare Mahon’s independence from the North; as works of art they open up the possibility of a perspective that, although it may not provide solutions, at least offers an alternative way of seeing and speaking about the world [...]. A voice, or voices, which in his own words ”has something to say beyond the shores of Ireland”.’ (p.188.)

Dillon Johnston, ‘MacNeice and Mahon’, in Irish Poetry after Joyce (Syracuse UP 1997), pp.204-335 [orig. Notre Dame UP 1985]: ‘Characteristically, Mahon establishes a “theoptic” view in which human endeavour dwindles before the vastness of hsitory and the heavens. The particular conditions of exile may matter only to us; however, that they matter nevertheless is Mahon’s new note [in “A Lighthouse in Maine”, The Hunt by Night]. / To the relativist generalisation of “A Garage in Co. Cork” that “we might be almost anywhere”, he responds, “But we are in one place and one place only ...”. In the volume’s concluding poem, “The Globe in North Carolina”, the fact that the poet abides in one place, his wife in another, recalls him from his “theoptic” revery [quotes last stanza, MHN, p.63]. / To my mind this metaphysical valediction is Mahon’s most successful love poem [...] The effect ... is characteristic Mahon: to juxtapose the enormous perspective of the “merely human” view, to address a restrited audience, and to establish thought slant rhyme, lines from popular siongs, and direct colloquial address - a tone as appropriate to correspondence as to art.’ (pp.242-43.)

Fintan O’Toole, (Culture Shock [column], in The Irish Times, 4 June 2011, Weekend Review: ‘[...] One of the few contemporary artists who has been able to draw on Titanic’s power while retaining a sense of artistic discretion is Derek Mahon, whose grandfather worked as a boilermaker at Harland and Wolff. Mahon has contemplated the disaster in a series of poems, including the haunting “After the Titanic”. But the most potent is surely “A Refusal to Mourn”, about his grandfather’s last days on “a small farmhouse / At the edge of a new estate”. The poem is a meticulous evocation of boredom, loneliness and displacement. Mahon imagines the man’s very name being erased in time from his gravestone by the “astringent” Irish rain. And then, almost unnoticed, he evokes [the] Titanic: “And his boilers lie like tombs / In the mud of the sea bed / Till the next ice age comes.” Subtle, quiet and profound, Mahon’s image is everything that artistic uses of Titanic tend not to be.’ (See full version of the poem under Anthology - as attached.)

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REVIEWS

Mark Ford: ‘I can’t bear poems about grandfathers, or fishing expeditions, or what it’s like to move into a new house, unless their very, very good poems ... I start off prejudiced against them because I find the subject matter so boring ... I guess basically I’m always looking for gaps, little fissures where “a thought might grow”, to use Derek Mahon’s phrase.’ (Interview with Graham Bradshaw in Robert Crawford et al., eds., Talking Verse (St. Andrews: Verse 1995); quoted in Helen Vendler, ‘Scoop from the tide pools: The allegories and mimicries of Mark Ford’, Times Literary Supplement (1 Jan. 1999), p.11-12; quoting Times Literary Supplement review of 1 March 1996 [here p.12].[ top ]

Jamie McKendrick, ‘Earth-residence’, review of The Hudson Letter (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press [1995]), 79pp., in Times Literary Supplement (12 April 1996), p.25; discounts Yaddo Letter, celebrates The Hudson Letter, and notes systematic use of literary quotation, so characteristic of Mahon’s ‘relentlessly literary nature (or culture)’, including clear allusions to Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Hart Crane, whose lines about ‘drinking Bacardi and talking USA’ are echoed in Mahon’s ending: ‘and sat in Pepe’s/drinking (rum and) Coke with retired hippies/who long ago gave up on the land and settled on the rocks’; reviewer refers particularly to the mock-guilty parenthesis in this sardonic last line; Mahon’s use of the word ‘home’ is noted in the context of his ‘bleak gift of fending off any tribal loyalty while not deceiving himself that that sets him free - a difficult Ulster heritage’; the poem ‘IV Waterfront’ is here called a ‘down-beat Second Coming’.

Brian Donnelly, intro. to Irish University Review, ‘Derek Mahon Special Number’, 24, 1 (1994): ‘The Yeatsian ideal of rootedness and community that propelled Irish cultural history for most of the twentieth century has its antithesis in Mahon’s images of lost tribes and desolate headlands.’ (p.[ii]). ‘Mahon’s sense of the bleakness of man’s condition is almost always counterpointed by his habit of glimpsing those fleeting moments when light or beauty flickers out of unlikely surroundings’ (idem.; both quoted in John Constable, ‘Derek Mahon’s Development’, in Chosen Ground [... &c.], ed. Neil Corcoran, 1992, pp.107-18; q.p. [See longer extracts from Constable - as attached.]

Oonagh Warke reviews The Hudson Letter (1995), departing from extended quotation from Mahon’s rendering therein of Ovid’s tale of the revenge of Procne upon her husband King Tereus in serving up his own son, in which the concluding lines, ‘Never mind the hidden agenda, the sub-text / it’s not really about male arrogance, “rough sex” / or vengeful sisterhood, but about art / and the encoded mysteries of the human heart.’ [q. source; prob. Books Ireland.]

Martin Mooney, ‘Nice Little Earners’, in Fortnight Review (Oct. 1996), p.35 [review of Derek Mahon, Journalism, Gallery 1996, and Gregory A. Schirmer, ed., Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke, Smythe 1996)]: quotes remark that Edna and Michael Longley tend ‘to over-emphasise the Ulster aspect of [MacNeice’s] personality’, and further: ‘to make him out as an “Ulster poet” is to circumscribe not only his interests but his achievements’; further [on Hewitt’s concern with ‘Planter’s stock’:] ‘stock means nothing unless you want it to’. Also quotes Mahon on Hewitt’s insistence that the artist be ‘rooted man’: ‘This is a bit tough on thistledown; and, speaking as a twig in a stream, I feel there’s a certain harshness, a dogmatism, at work there’. Also quotes ‘The Coleraine Triangle’ [essay], reflecting on the ‘strange combination of its derivative hedonism and sabbatarian grimness’ and further: ‘a hypothetical future in which everyone has departed. The Catholics have all moved South or gone to the States; the Protestants have gone to England, or Canada, or Australia. A stiff breeze through the broken windows scatters antique Newsletters across the carpets of the northern Counties Hotel ... Nothing happens here, and maybe nothing ever happened ... .’ (Mahon, op. cit., Mooney, op. cit., p.35.)

Des O’Rawe, Mahon’s Phaedra reviewed with Brendan Kennelly, Antigone, in Irish Review (Winter 1997), p.143ff, notes: ‘Mahon [took] an opportunity to mingle his knowledge of classical tragedy with his love of French literature [...] accentuates certain structural and metaphorical elements [...] gestures towards Euripides rather than Racine, who sought to minimise the role of the gods in his tragedy [...] dispensed with the Neo-classical convention of referring to the Gods by their Roman names and has edited out a number of references - “des cruels Pallantides”, for example - which might mean little to a contemporary audience.’ ; O’Rawe notes the use of a “psycho-analysed” vocabulary, e.g.,‘anorexic ghost’, ‘sadistic whim’, ‘uncontrollable libido’, and remarks on a ‘sound understanding of theatrical practice but also a healthy scepticism towards the use of these plays as propaganda.’

Patrick Crotty, ‘Letters from - and to - Portrush’, review of Journalism, in Times Literary Supplement (29 Nov. 1997), p.26; notes that his sensibility appear wholly engaged in the Vogue piece he wrote on J. G. Farrell, to whom “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” is dedicated, and considers the recorded meeting with Anthony Burgess “hampered by the glossiness of its origins”.

Gerald Dawe, ‘Floating free of the Here and Now’, review of The Yellow Book, in Irish Times (20 Dec. 1997), [q.p.]: ‘A sequence of twenty sections, following on from part two of The Hudson Letter (1995), make this long poem epic in its desire to portray our fin de siècle [...] What these poems rail against is a spiritual vacuity and cultural hype of self-astonishment [...] Mahon’s poems are haunted by the good old bad old times. The embattled stoicism of The Yellow Book includes as hero Austin Clarke, unlike Sixties Belfast, Dublin and London, and a Swiftian misanthropy at full throttle’; ’Behind the rage there is an order, though, as Mahon tries, from his observation dug-out, his “Axel’s Castle” overlooking the world, to reason with the declining value of Capitol Art. The Yellow Book lambasts current fakery, elaborates the brave hearts of the past and what remains for the solitary ones in Yeatsian afterglow’; ‘Mahon is a priceless poet [...] refuses to lapse into the requisite consolations of some much contemporary poetry while being able to write eloquently of loss, ironically of nostalgia, and robustly of his writing self [...] This, as they say, is the business: an essential buy.’

Gerald Dawe, ‘So much going on it could make a soul dizzy’, review of New Collected Poems, in The Irish Times (2 July 2011), Weekend Review, p.11: ‘[...] Grand absolutes, though, fall away in the simple pleasures of reading Mahon. If you want “big” Yeatsian stanzas, they are here in abundance; jewels of haiku, go no farther; lyrical languor, sparking irony, wry humour, demotically discursive derring-do, Zen-like epiphany, the art of poetry is displayed in all its teeming variousness on every page. Not as a manual of affectation and demonstrative style but as a craftsman who sees language as the raw material that has to be properly used; as a consequence, the work is phenomenal. If Joyce really did think that Dublin could be reconstructed from Ulysses, Mahon’s New Collected Poems will similarly provide time-capsule proof of late-20th- and early-21st-century transatlantic life. / Although in New Collected Poems the reader discovers the physical and natural landscape alongside a creaturely life, the overwhelming sound is of a voice dramatically portraying the odds on the planet surviving, the aesthetic mismatch between the market and art values, the vacuity of much that is being pushed at us as “popular”, a critical dialogue between past and present, between the western world and the east (like Louis MacNeice, Mahon has found an India of the mind), between Swiftian misanthropy and Wildean playfulness, the freedom of the visual arts and the dedicated antiheroic figures of literature. The cultural wars are zipping like lightning through this poet’s world as never before. There is so much going on in New Collected Poems it could make a soul dizzy. / Some may grumble about poems that have been cut adrift from the mother ship – A Kensington Notebook, for one – but 370 or so pages of Mahon’s poetry contained within this New Collected Poems  is a revelation. As a book of convergences, detached from its separate roots in individual volumes, New Collected Poems shows Mahon as sprightly and as engaging as he was at the very beginning of his writing life, in the 1960s. Dreams of a Summer Night, the concluding poem, finishes on: “I await the daylight we were born to love: / birds at a window, boats on a rising wave, / light dancing on dawn water, the lives we live.” These last four words of New Collected Poems , “the lives we live”, recall what the great American poet Wallace Stevens said about how poetry “helps us to live our lives”. New Collected Poems helps too; it is a massive poetic achievement, no mistake.’

Hugh Haughton, ‘Le spleen in Dublin’, review of The Yellow Book in Times Literary Supplement (14 April 1998), remarks that Mahon dried up when he dried out; calls Hudson Letter a collection of Audenesque bagatelles and occasional pieces, with a loquacious, improvisatory eighteen-part letter from America recording “an exile and a stranger’s” impressions of glitzy alien Manhattan; opens with miraculously atmospheric translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Paysage’; with the possible exception of Ciaran Carson, no other Irish poet is so much at home in our complex urban culture’. (TLS, p.24.)

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W. J. McCormack, reviewing of Fran Brearton, The Great War in Irish Poetry: W. B. Yeats to Michael Longley (OUP 2000), calls Derek Mahon ‘a defector to the South’.

Alistair Eliot, reviewing Stephen Romer, ed., Twentieth-Century French Poems (Faber & Faber [2002]), which includes a translation of Jaccottet by Derek Mahon of which Eliot remarks: ‘Derek Mahon cannot make Jaccottet sound as good in English as he is in French’.

Terence Brown, ‘Absorbing, insightful’ [review of The Poetry of Derek Mahon, ed. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews [here Kennedy-Jones], in The Irish Times (24 Aug. 2002): ‘Poetry may alert us to the anguish of the human condition, but it cannot redeem us. / By contrast, some critics in this book hint that the source of poetry in work as mesmeric in its music as Mahon’s can be, may be something in human consciousness that transcends “the mute phenomena” and the flux of time and history, something poetry helps us to experience as the ground of our being (to deploy Paul Tillich’s famous phrase). Among these contributions is Bruce Stewart’s moving investigation of the term “secular mysticism”, which he carefully unpacks to see if it contains anything substantial. He leaves us with the tantalising possibility that it might, which he implies is just what Mahon’s poetry does: “The contrasting spheres of spirituality and semiotics, mysticism and scepticism, metaphysics and cultural relativity are conventionally opposed, yet Mahon succeeds in making them mesh like gears in poem after poem. Is this what is meant by secular mysticism? If so, it might be the right name for his intellectual temper.” Also discusses contribs. by Stan Smith, Jerzy Jarivicz and Edna Longley. [See copy - as attached].

Note: In an essay prefaced to the Selected Poems of Philippe Jaccottet ([Harmonsworth:] Penguin 1988), Mahon writes: ‘he is a secular mystic, an explorer of le vrai lieu (“the real place”)’ - a remark which Terence Brown quotes in his Introduction to Mahon’s critical prose, compiled as Journalism (1996), adding that ‘his [Mahon’s] own secular mysticism finds expression’ in poems such as such as “Light Music” sequence and “A Garage in Co. Cork”. Journalism , Oldcastle: Gallery Press 1996, p.19). Mahon makes oblique reference to his own edition of Jaccottet in a review of Selected Poems of Paul Eluard , translated by Gilbert Bowen, and Une Transaction Sècrete by Jaccottet in The Irish Times during in 1988, where he speaks of Jaccottet as ‘appearing soon in a new Penguin series’. (Ibid., p.135.) A bilingual edition of Jaccottet was afterwards issued by Gallery Press in 1996.

Vona Groarke, ‘majestic reminders aid the ennui’, review of Harbour Lights, in The Irish Times (7 Jan. 2006), Weekend, p.10: ‘One of Derek Mahon’s greatest skills as a poet has always been to know how to slip himself into a poem. [...] This deftness is not always in evidence in recent collections, where the lesser poems skirt with soap-box poetics and read, at times, like journal entries that do little more than showcase the poet’s habits and opinions. [...] “New Wave” is surely this collection’s high-water mark. Its capacious sweep recalls the ambitious and aching beauty of such touchstone poems as “A Disused Shed in Co Wexford”, “The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush” and “The Globe in North Carolina”. Part film-noir, part narrative photography in the style of Robert Doisneau, the poem plays with light and shadow in a sequence of crepuscular, sea-side scenes in which the narrative voiceover is withheld so that the images are given to us without the judgment of the giver. / ‘The sky, its racing stripes and ice-cream colours, / thin cries of children from the beach below, / and the hurtling gulls, are too heartbreaking; / they shut the shutters and return to the dark.’ / This rivals the most memorable achievements of his long career and reminds us, happily, just how majestic a poet Mahon can be.’ [End; see full text in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews” - as attached.]

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David Wheatley, reviewing The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism by Terence Brown, in The Irish Times (21 Aug. 2010), Weekend Review, writes parenthetically: ‘It would be interesting, in passing, to know whether Derek Mahon stands by his statement to Brown in a 1985 interview, and quoted here, that MacNeice “had no place in the intellectual history of modern Ireland”.’

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Michael Hinds, ‘(Re)writing’: review of New Collected Poems, in Irish Literary Supplement, 32: 2 [Irish Studies Program, Boston College] (Spring 2013): ‘[...] One thing that Mahon needs to be freed from more than anything is not his own self-consciousness, but the identity-political lens that tends to be adopted to interpret that self-consciousness; just as Van Morrison is not entirely explained by the category of Northern Protestant. Mahon’s aesthetic last stands should not be classified as evidence of an inveterate siege mentality. Earlier poems like “Courtyards in Delft” had already shown that Mahon himself has always attempted to give such formulations of identity the same deep freeze of artistic analogy, and his best poetry involves the expression of an alienated rage that is the direct privilege of being an outcast. The sheer nastiness of “Derry Morning,” its willingness to upset just about everybody, is perhaps more impressive now than it was at first sight; long reflection allows that the poem’s apparent meanness of purpose be seen as much as a statement of classical conviction rather than a straightforward planctus. Mahon should have become the Juvenal of our time, but somehow he never quite became the satirist that he might, maybe because he just could not sustain the ve intensity of that Derry poem’s stringencies, or because he could not ignore the danger of hypocrisy, the risk a goad always runs.

[Michael Hinds, on Mahon - cont.] It is true sometimes Mahon just seems too pleased with his own intelligence, as in the irksome ostentation of “frugivorous” in “Last of the Fire Kings” and too many villanelles (the success of “Antarctica,” the straining “solitary enzyme” apart) should be enough for anybody). A pedantic side to him emerges occasionally, as with the version of Rimband’s “Le Bateau Ivre,” which is marked by its inclination to correct Rimbaud, to arrest him into pauses, as the percussive concourse of the French becomes a cautiously progressive English that chooses to resonate rather than flow. Carson and Beckett have both done it much better in their own ways. Mahon might agree, as it turns out; “The Drunken Barge” is another casualty of the latest cull. [...] (See full copy - as attached.)

Patricia Craig, ‘Appreciation of Derek Mahon’, in Democrat [Dunbartonshire] (19 Oct. 2020)

[...] In his relations with others Derek Mahon could be thrawn, touchy, out of sorts; there were times when he needed to be left alone. He was also benign, generous, outgoing (when he wasn’t being introverted), funny, stimulating and entertaining. For someone whose poems are replete with images and artefacts ( ‘things [that] reclaim their vibrant lives’) Mahon was unusually averse to acquisition. His living quarters tended to contain only the minimum requirements (but everything had to be arranged just so) - and even books that came into his hands flew out of them again, as presents to friends or to local booksellers, once their purpose was fulfilled. (The few he kept included Louis MacNeice’s The Strings are False and a Collected Yeats.) A complex personality, then, whose prodigious talent has left the field of literature immeasurably enriched, and whose strong impact on the lives of his friends and admirers alike is a testimony to his uniqueness. We will mourn the ‘high-spirited independent stance’ he attributed to Michael D. Higgins in the last poem in his last book, addressed to the President of Ireland but also applicable to himself. Here’s another couple of lines from the Simmons elegy to round things off: ‘“Love what you can, die game,” you said - / and so you did, and so you did.’ [As attached.]

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