‘[...] A poem, we might infer, struggles for a kind of independent existence made possible by language, and has to fight for this freedom against insensate and life-denying limitations, against the perpetually greater power of reality. The poem, we might also infer, is free of subjective as well as objective determinism. ‘The “thought” in Mahon’s line is detached from any notion of subjective origin. This allows for a view of the subject not as something which intactly precedes the poem, but something that is constructed in and through the poem, it “grows”. ... we cannot or should not presuppose what we will find in it. Its course is not prematurely decided by the poet but is self-generating. The poem is a living thing. ... The poem, that is, is an expression of hope as well as freedom because it grows beyond our usual terms of reference, beyond what we can see or even foresee here and now. Mahon’s line emphasises chanciness ... and it is the chancy element in creativity, the refusal of predictability and certainty, which is the guarantee of hope and moral and imaginative power.’

‘Where the countrified Heaney is absorbed by an intimately known locale and conducts a long and troubled dialogue with himself over the guilt he feels for breaking with traditional pieties and the tribe’s complicity, Mahon writes as an outsider, an agnostic, an itinerant, an existential risk-taker.’ (p.236). ‘He is an impresario of alternatives’. (idem.)

‘Mahon’s sympathies flow most readily toward exotic and exciting individuals such as the tragic star or forger who has broken the rules, toward the frightened birds [...], toward the gipsies ... who live indifferent to national boundaries and all the trappings of the normal social code. [...] Mahon pleads eloquently and poignantly on behalf of the guilty, the ostracised and the isolated.’ (p.239.)

Andrews speaks of Mahon’s poems on his grandfather and uncle: ‘These figures, treated with warmth and humanity as well as wit, embody what for Mahon are some of the more positive elements of Protestant Belfast - an idiosyncratic rebelliousness, irrepressible personality in a barbarous world.’ (idem.)

On “Poems Beginning with a Line from Cavafy”: ‘With convoluting irony, he invokes the unreconciled and the damned as the only element in these diminished circumstances with which he can identify: “The unreconciled, in their metaphysical pain, / Dangle from lamp-posts in the dawn rain; / And much dies with them. [... &c.]’.

‘The relation of the poet to his environment involves the relation of the poet to his language. There is in Mahon’s poetry a sense of [241] the futility of pretending that the putative exactitude of words can ever measure up to the actual mystery of things and feelings. [...] The best the poet can hope to do is offer an analogy for experience, one that is incomplete, provisional, experimental, rather than an imitation of experience.’ (pp.241-42.)

‘Poetry is always generated out of loss and absence (p.242) [... T]he poet finds that the gap between self and word cannot be sustained unproblematically.’ (p.243).

‘Based on the traditional notion of losing the self in order to find it, of dissolving separate identity in the unity of the whole of creation, dying into life, “Lives” consists of a series of poetic gambits which constitute a wild, playful fantasy of metamorphosis.’ (p.243.)

[...] ‘“Lives” is dedicated to Heaney, and may be read as a reply to the religious intensity with which Heaney presses his self-identifications. Mahon’s secular, ironic intelligence dispels awe, forces the imagination to come up against practical necessity and mocks the notion of direct communion with the past. His anthropological habit of mind does not discover a landscape instinct with meaningful signs, but one littered with meaningless rubble. [Quotes Kierkegaard on “the point at which the abyss swallows up the self, the point at which the individual himself becomes a mirage”].

Mahon quotes William James’s sentence at the end of “Entropy”: ‘Had we no “concepts”, we should live simply “getting” each successive moment of experience, as the sessile sea-anenome on its rock receives whatever nourishment the washes of the waves may bring’. (James, Some Problems in Philosophy, 1979, p.39; Andrews, p.245.)

‘The poet savagely, crudely, rounds on himself for surrendering to the privileged idealism of bourgeois fantasy, and elevating the status of “divine wisdom”.’ (p.246; quotes ‘what middle class cunts we are [... &c.]’.)

‘Mahon insists on the power of mind to originate a whole rang of things which are not the case or to invoke things which have been excluded from what the case is generally assumed to be, so that the very notion of any stable meaning or permanent value inhering in the actual given world becomes highly problematic. To see reality as an infinitely plural affair is to resist the established ways in which it is ordered and classified. It is to allow for the speculative and inventive play of mind which [249] ensures the self’s freedom from its own circumstances. (pp.248-49.)

‘Where Heaney strains towards transcendent closure, and the assuagements and release the contingent world that are to be found in the satisfactions of discovering archetypal patterns, timeless truths, Mahon specialises in the “love-play of the ironic conscience”. Andrews does not consider “A Disused Shed” Mahon’s best poem, but rather others in which the pathos is ‘more rigorously and dramatically counterpointed by a qualifying irony.’ (p.251.) Selects instead “The Last of the Fire Kings”. ‘Mahon’s “ideal society” ultimately exists only in some realm beyond mind and language. (p.252.)

‘In Mahon’s world, all are damned. To be “born again”, in Mahon’s version of Calvinist theology, is an aesthetic enterprise, and a repeated challenge to creativity No longer sure of his society, his language or himself, the poet still feels driven, in these reduced circumstances, to discover an “afterlife” in art.’ (ibid.)

‘[...] he foresees another holocaust, another Blitz, but even in the face of final destruction does not allow irony to cancel completely his affirmation of the unquenchable human spirit and his sense of continuity [quotes “One of these Nights” in The Hunt by Night]. Further, ‘Calvinism ... continues to provide part of a basic vocabulary of Apocalypse’ (p.255.)

‘Increasingly, Mahon presents himself as an artist in the art of failure, operating on a Beckettian edge, his resources shrunk to the terminal and minimal.’ (p.256.)

‘From the beginning, Mahon’s art has had most of its original in a notion of “impossibility”. Decomposition has always been a prime motive of composition.’ (Idem.) Remarks on “A Garage in Co. Cork”: ‘There is a subtle play of mind and feeling resonating in the delicately nuanced particulars of a dimly remembered place.’ [Quotes “Where did they go? ... .”] But then at the end the poet cancels all that has gone before with a deadening, abstract statement about the irrelevance of the inventiveness that the mind delights in: [quotes “But we are in one place, ...”].’ (p.259.)

Andrews offers criticisms: ‘Slackening of tension, lack of unity, a tendency to reduce and to simplify, a yielding to didactic resolutions: these are the old cankers which I find blighting the growth of Mahon’s poetic “thought” ... Cultivation of the problematic is very hard to sustain. It requires the heroism of [260] patience.’; ‘[...] a voice which is amused, bemused, bewildered, despairing, buoyant, cynical, witty, sophisticated far beyond the simplicities of mere cynicism, the expression of an agonised intelligence eternally rehearsing the (diminished) possibilities.’ (p.262; ... &c.).

See also ‘Introduction’, in ibid., pp.1-24.