Source: Michael Hinds, ‘(Re)writing’: review of New Collected Poems, in Irish Literary Supplement, 32: 2 [Irish Studies Program, Boston College] (Spring 2013) Available online at Gale Literature Resources - online; accessed 27 Jan. 2023. .

ENOUGH TIME HAS ELAPSED since the 2011 publication of Derek Mahon’s New Collected Poems to allow for a reading of it which can attempt more than the identification and assessment of the revisions which the poet had visited upon his back pages (and not for the first time); having said that, this is not an easy thing to ignore, given that any poet who refashions their work is clearly doing so in the hope that someone will notice. Beyond this, it also suggests a poet who has got tired of writing individual poems, and who has become more concerned with the engravure of a life-text, a business that remains unfinished until you are finished. Whitman comes to mind above all in this context, and Mahon has been adeptly accompliced by Gallery Press in another Whitmanic enterprise, the creation of a beautiful book that proudly puts its own artefacture on show.

As a book-event, Mahon’s New Collected Poems is immediately impressive, riskily ignoring the arrangements of Mahon’s earlier books in favor of making something new; this does not generate the epitaphic aura of a deathbed edition, therefore, but rather promotes the poet as the most effective moderator of his own work, at least as long as he lives. The very things that Mahon has removed are the things that scholarship will posthumously restore, of course, but to dismiss what he is doing in this book as somehow irresponsible or sad is off the mark; if Mahon is engaging in plastic surgery, it is at least self-administered, another wrangle with the limits of his own authority. Nobody has died.

Debating the merits of the revisions is great fun, of course, but it also accepts that there is a canonical corpus worth arguing about, and there is no question about that; larger concerns, however, about how to map Mahon into broader contexts, as well as how to provide an assessment of the relevance of his overall achievements, are considerably more problematic. At a gong-fest in UCD in Summer 2011, honorary doctorates were awarded to Garry Trudeau, the creator of Doonesbury, as well as every Irish poet to have held the office of the Ireland Professor for Poetry (in addition to Ciaran Carson, professor of poetry at Queen’s). The party was hierarchically significant in all sorts of ways: firstly, Trudeau’s presence presented an anxious query about the real cultural situation of poetry in Ireland by creating a bigger stir than the combined forces of the poetic golden generation. An even more telling event, at least for our immediate purposes, was when each of the newly-capped professors was given a copy of the same New Collected Poems of Mahon. Muldoon aside, Mahon was just about the only member of Irish poetry’s star chamber not to have been commenced at the ceremony, and the gift spoke very loudly of an admission that Mahon was a genuine Banquo’s ghost at the feast, and also that his absence was regrettable, maybe even embarrassing; however, it also implied his fundamental necessity to the map of Irish poetry, somebody who could not be ignored. Did his absence imply his superiority or his irrelevance?

The obvious answer is both. Mahon’s ability as a writer of hardcase poems that do not budge from your mind is un-ignorable, and the extremely high estimation of “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” by critics such as Declan Kiberd does not seem excessive. Other high points, such as “The Snow Party,” radiate intelligence and courage, most particularly because they emerge out of the mumblecore trauma of the Troubles as legitimizations of the aesthetic in spite of everything, asserting the ability of poets to generate a temporary peace while everything and everybody else burns; and yet, if that is poignantly true of his work from that time, it has arguably become harder to recognize in his more recent poems.

One argument for this is that Mahon’s work (and his attitudinizing) has remained fundamentally the same since the 1970s, for all that he has become a little less enraged; on the other hand, the context in which that work operates is now radically different. In the 1980s, Mahon’s aestheticism was a barricading that metaphorically echoed and rebuked the other forms of redoubt mapped into politics. In an atmosphere of pomo plurality, and all of its complacent self-congratulation, there is little left for Mahon to reprove. Writing a villanelle about Titus Oates in 1985 summons a stoic romance that requires no explanation - “’I am just going outside and may be some time.’ / At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.’”; the same gravitas just cannot be mustered by writing about holidaying in Lanzarote in 2011 (”Under the Volcanoes”). The great crisis in Mahon’s work has come about in a surprising way. He got happy. The outcast now writes as if he owns the place, at least a small part of Kinsale, anyway, a loyal patron of local restaurants:

One of the most unignorable tendencies in Mahon’s work is his regard for literary lives, as if they are the ones most worth living, and his particular fascination with the mapping of a writer into a particular environment, as if that very idea in itself involves a creative kinesis: “Ovid in Tomis,” “Camus in Ulster,” “Jean Rhys in Kettner’s,” “Brian Moore’s Belfast.” The writers keep coming - Malcolm Lowry, Beckett, Donleavy, De Quinsey, MacNeice, Pasternak - as do the places, demanding that we read Mahon as a traveler, not a tourist, a botanizer of asphalt rather than a tragic deracine. Beyond this, however, what comes over more powerfully is Mahon’s ability as a parodist of other poets, particularly his contemporaries. This is detectable throughout his career, as when in “Afterlives,” he out-Simmonsed James Simmons (the dedicatee of the poem), at least with the notorious rebuke in the poem’s first version of poets like themselves as “middle-class cunts” (in some eyes, even more notorious is the poem’s revision to “middle class shits”). Each of Mahon’s dedications comes to feel like a challenge as the poem takes on its real work of deliberately ventriloquizing its dedicatee; so in “Lines for Seamus Heaney,” the tersely compound stanzas of Heaney’s 1970s work are handed back to him, as a smirky but sincere compliment. Even when there is no dedicatee, poems read like potential piss-takes, as in how “The Mayo Tao” appears to have Longley in mind even though he is unnamed. The poem that really guides the reader to this tendency is “The Forger,” regrettably but significantly omitted from the current Collected, which stresses that craft (and particularly mimetic craft) is as elevated a poetic calling as any other:

In the Collected Poems that Mahon published with Gallery in 1999, “The Forger” was provocatively preceded by “A Portrait of the Artist,” which also stresses the artisanal determination of poetry through its description of how Van Gogh embricated the coal mines of Belgium with the vividity of Provence; it makes for heavy sunlight:

For all of the acute and apt sensitivity to painting so evident throughout his best poems, it is nevertheless his literariness that is most extraordinary; nothing is more representatively late-Mahonish than a poem beginning in a state of encounter with the outside world, only to modulate quickly into bookish discursivity, as if the answer will always be found in a book he has just read; so “Smoke” starts with the smoking of a fag, and makes its desolately witty way via Lady Bracknell to the father of the carnivalesque:

As has been said above, the closed loop of his self-reflexivity wants a difficult context, and the timidly desperate twenty-first century compares poorly to the urgently desperate 1980s in that regard. It is not that Mahon is unaware of this, and the shift from a major to a minor key is precisely the subject of much of his recent work. He has moved into the Horatian poetry of retirement, where his main gag is that Derek Mahon says he is not going to play the role of Derek Mahon any more. This fugitive role has always been in play, however, and the abjuration of a role might just be another part of his peculiar mischief. When he writes in “A New Start” of his determination to leave the “hysteria” of cities behind, you would love to believe him, but it is difficult to buy it entirely:

Mahon’s recent poetry is no less intellectually ostentatious than his earlier work, the disdain for aesthetics and their fal-de-lals is belied by a language that actively flaunts its philosophical pretensions:

The discovery of simplicity in this poem convinces only if you take it entirely seriously, that here is a meaningful recantation of the aesthetic; yet this demands simultaneously to be read as more literary manners, a gesture no less aesthetic than anything anywhere else in Mahon’s work. Taking these poems literally would destroy any real pleasure that they might give; the weight if that knife is so tangible because others have written about such things before, like Elizabeth Bishop in “Crusoe in England.” Like James Brown on his knees at the end of a concert, Mahon’s retreat is a ruse, and for all the simplicity, this is still a poet who wants to let you know that he has read Said’s On Late Style (in “Dreams of a Summer Night”).

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 performative intensity of that Derry poem’s stringencies, or because he could not ignore the danger of hypocrisy, the risk a goad always runs.

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.

Reviewing this book is a curious phenomenon, revisiting so much material that feels so thoroughly familiar, but there is still surprise to be discovered, at least in the editing-out of poems like “The Kensington Notebook,” which had to be removed in order for me to realize that I did not miss it. It is a poem that is a gift to scholars, which is its precise problem; it is difficult to imagine the poem having any other readership. The new Mahon writes raps for the Cork Simon Community, inviting his established readership to sniff. This also proves that the maneuvering of these poems in and out of the Collected edition is a necessary reflection of Mahon’s art. His individual volumes were never really conceptualized as anything other than showcases for the brilliancies of individual poems; for all that he is still making a book here, Mahon is nevertheless showing himself as a poet of the poem rather than the tome-tomb. Other poets might be read better cumulatively, as with the nervous accretiveness of Carson’s sequences, the surely momentous book-events of Heaney; but Mahon gives us some of poetry’s greatest instances, some of which deserve a final mention. In a poetic world full of haiku abuse, “The Snow Party” gives quiddity to a form that is too often employed for facility, and the vision of a blandly proud church-on-TV congregation in “Songs of Praise” is given a powerful authenticity-effect by the deft description of a banal human act:

Mahon is not stupid. An adept scholar himself, he knows what scholarship does when you are dead, and he also knows what it can do to you when you are alive. Through his late refashioning, and for all of his literariness, Mahon is now seeking a broader demographic than the people who sit on panel discussions. This book seeks a crafty and confident exploration of whatever plasticity Mahon can still discover in the poems that wrote (and rewrote) life; it needs to be read in the same spirit.