‘Mahon, the lesser writer [than Heaney], has been in the nature of his poetic temperament, a gratifyingly singular figure in the Ulster literary landscape. Alone among the lot, he grasped from the start that the poet is congenitally an outsider in relation to his community and its norms and sanctions. [T]he ways in which a poet’s art and life enact this crucial realisation can of course vary enormously, from oblique and disguised to overt and radical. Nor does the ncessary burden of being an outsider mean the poet cannot be an insider also; indeed, he probably had better be, and in ways more diversely penetriative than managed by most people, for full nourishment of his talent; and that Mahon’s poetry perspectives have been to exclusively and disconnectedly from “outside” may seem a factor vitiating his achievement.’ ([Quotes “Glengormley”]; p.39).

‘One sometimes suspects Mahon finds the whole of human civilisation a fragile barely credible brief fluke on the blackness of the universe; and if his expression of alienation occasionally deviates into attitudinising, generally it is persuasively authentic, something temperamentally removed from the bright games-playing offered recently by Craig Raine’s Martian’s-eye view of human behaviour.’ (p.39.).

‘In any case, it seems Mahon cannot help himself; less because he is more introverted than Heaney, for actually Mahon’s poetic self-analyses do not produce much rich quarrying of inner life and can tend towards brittle posturing, with a proness tacitly to claim, in a limitedly literary way, affinity with famous personages from the iconoclastic outsiders’ hall of fame such as Villon, Corbière, Beckett, de Quincey, Marilyn Monroe; but rather because whenever he does look at the immediately human his gaze soon skids off beyond it to the otherworldly, or end-of-the-worldly, spatial or temporal frontiers which fascinate him.’ (p.40.)

Mahon’s poetic manner is, in relation to his themes of wilderness, human transience, spiritual disarray and the ruggedness of survival, conspicuously non-mimetic: such matters are handled with erudite spare elegance. Flickering wit and effecting striking fusions and elisions, his can be an very impressive verse-medium. Notable is an ability to seize directly his real subject without cumbersome preliminaries, then unfold a poem; imaginative logic without clutter.’ (p.41).

‘But among Mahon’s very fine poems exemplifying an art of lucid compression vitalised by invention, were always others more precarious, elegantly slight, or fanciful rather than imaginatively shapes. And his work since the eary 1970s, without change in basic preoccupations and strategies, shows a serious pervasive debilitation’ [...] dwindled to a mere wryness wrinkling pools of ennui’; ‘symptomatic of a crucial loss in poetic self-confidence, for one “development” in Mahon’s thematically rather static poetic career has been towards a more chastened assertion of his personal stance and vision.’

‘Out on a limb is where poetic imagination should reach to, but Mahon’s has dwelt there too exclusively, remote and almost severed from sustaining rootedness in the intricate contingent details and textures of human dailiness. Undernourished on the thin fare it has almost exhausted, an imagination can lose its appetite. A kind of poetic anorexia is suggested by “The Sea in Winter” where Mahon, “unnerved, my talents on the shelf”, questions his whole writing enterprise.’ (p.41.)

‘Significant too may be Mahon’s amendment, in “Rage for Order”, of his original affirmation of the poet’s “germinal ironies”, the adjective intimating connection and growth, to the gloomy, merely personal “desperate ironies”. Mahon’s talent, which has blazed a lonely track in Ulster poetry and created some fine unique poems, seems now in a state of critical fatigue, with little among the ingredients of his recent writings to suggest direction along which decline might prove reversible.’ (p.42.)

Quotes: ‘God is alive and lives under stone. / Already in a lost hub-cap is conceived / The idea society which will replace our own.’ (“The Mute Phenomena”).

On Heaney & Mahon: ‘With gifts superior to Mahon’s, and more profound and substantial insights, Heaney the community-nurtured poet is at last [i.e., in Field Work] showing a capacity for the necessary alienated intransigence Mahon has known perhaps too unrelievedly and exclusively, but of which the lesser Ulster poets are cosily innocent.’ (p.44).