Quotes Heaney’s pre-publication review of Mahon’s The Hunt by Night: ‘This is Mahon’s most exuberant and authoritative single volume to date. Some creative tremor has given him deepening access to his source of power; it is as if the very modernity of his intelligence has goaded a primitive stamina in his imagination.’ (n.ref; here p.107.)

‘For Mahon’s work has from the beginning been marked by a witty detachment from a world the poet regards as a sort of perpetual affront. ... In the early work, the poet’s poise is never seriously disturbed. He conducts an elegant debate between himself and the world, but does so from a convenient distance; his ordinary, exasperating surroundings give colour and substance to the terms of that debate - body and soul, necessity and choice - but are curtly dismissed when the need for them is done. ... Mahon’s inventiveness in discovering solutions to the problem is impressive. One may simply “In Belfast” again) be a fallen angel and not get up - a strategy in which he wittily takes ‘a perverse pride’; or be ‘A meteor of golden light’ and set ‘fierce fire’ to the world (”Van Gogh among the Miners”); sell one’s soul for potage - the most worrying possibility; live like gipsies or nineties poets (”Gipsies”, “The Poets Lie where they Fell”); pass the hours in making a lengthy will (”Legacies” - after Villon); hole up on one’s own for a while pour mieux sauter (”The Prisoner”); or indulge the dream of a better, innocent place, thereby spending [108] life ‘in infinite preparation’ (”Recalling Aran”, “April on Toronto Island”). In most of the early poems, such “solutions” are ironically qualified. [...] In Night-Crossing, Mahon is in little danger of learning too fast; he is not yet ready to shrivel and let live.

The problem is regarded more seriously (or as a more serious problem) in the next book, Lives, partly because it just won’t go away [109] ... / For it is plain from the collection as a whole that the poet can no longer sustain his formerly crisp detachment from his own experience. In Night-Crossing, self sanguinely confronted its surroundings; but in Lives the distance between the two has begun to disappear ... / ‘Becoming an “anthropologist” of all varieties of life, he finds he “knows too much / To be anything any more”; and what if, somewhere in the future, someone else claims to have once been him? Plainly this, of all deaths of the self, is the one the poet is least able to face, and he rounds tartly on his imagined successor: “Let him revise / His insolent ontology / Or teach himself to pray.’

It’s a brilliant and, in the context, of Mahon’s work as a whole, wonderfully suggestive poem; yet one feels that, while now the poet is able to sing in the dark, there will be days when he’s barely able to whistle. Pressure from the past has from greater and more threatening than in Night-Crossing; and, while the poet’s urbanity and poise are finely sustained in the best poems of Lives, one guesses that something may eventually have to give. But there was to be one further important stage in Mahon’s development. In The Snow Party, his best book and one of the most satisfying collections of the last thirty or so years, he proved capable of antoher sort of poetry (and human) success. From the realisation of Lives - the knowledge that one cannot stand back from the world, or cannot without incurring a painful penalty - he reached now, for the time it took for certain poems to be written, a new elegiac mood in which aspiration and acceptance were given equal lyrical weight. The opening poem, “Afterlives”, quickly established his theme. (pp.108-110).

[...] It was difficult to imagine which direction Derek Mahon’s work might take after the triumph of The Snow Party. The pervading note of the collection, heard through the excellent sequence “Cavafy”, was one of pathos mingled with a qualifying irony. The poems seemed to resolve the debate (thereby sustaining it) from which all the earlier poetry had emerged by acknowledging that its terms were ultimately irreconcilable; whether or not someone else might reconcile them was not, in the nature of the case, the poet’s business.’

Constable dismisses Heaney’s judgement and offers a more accurate account of the failure of The Hunt by Night, taking “Courtyards in Delft” as the point d’appui: ‘The didactic conclusion is the first surprise. Mahon’s earliery poetry, drawing its strength from tension and equivocation, had always avoided the straightforward moral summing-up. His attitude to the dark country was composed at once of attraction and repulsion, and those conflicting emotions informed his view of almost everything. But he seems to have been driven, in The Hunt by Night, to resolve this inner division by cancelling one half of the equation. [.../]

This reduction of the poet’s debate to a single (and single-minded) proposition has robbed the poetry of its power. And yet ... Derek Mahon is fully aware of the risk he has taken. ... (p.115).

[/... ] The formal neatness is contingent upon the fact that the poet’s feelings are not engaged in them. ... failure to fuse the personal and the historical [“Ovid in Tomis”] (p.117); distance the images [in “Garage in West Cork” in a moralising conclusion.’ (p.118.)

Cites commentary on Heaney’s ‘poetic excavation’ to be found in David Cairns & Shaun Richards, ‘What Ish my Nation?, Writing Ireland (Manchester UP 1988), pp.142-48.

Quotes Declan Kiberd: ‘Irish people no longer live in a country of their own making’ being trapped in inherited tropes of the revival which have become a “downright oppression”’ (1984, pp.11, 13).

Further, Kiberd refers to Lionel Trilling’s distinction between sincerity and authenticity, the former assuming a given self to which one must be true while the latter ‘recognises that the [149] real problem is not to be true to the self but first to find a self worth being true to. It concedes that a man, or a nation, has many identities constantly remaking themselves.’ (Ibid., p.21).

Quotes G. B. Shaw: ‘[S]ocial questions never get solved until the pressure becomes so desperate that even governments recognise the necessity for moving. And to bring the pressure to this point, the poets must lend a hand to the few who are willing to do public work in the stages at which nothing but abuse is to be gained by it.’ (Shaw, 1964, p.975; here p.154.)

Quotes 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.).