Derek Mahon (1941-2020)

[Norman Derek Mahon;] b. 23 Nov. 1941, Belfast; raised Glengormley, to a Church of Ireland family, his father Norman and grandfather having worked in Harland and Wolff, East Belfast (‘blue-to-white-collar jobs’), his father (‘When are you going to give up the poetry nonsense?’) latterly became an inspector of engines; his mother Maisie [née Harrison] worked at the York St. Flax Spinning Co. [Linen] and became a house-wife after marriage; lived first at Salisbury Ave., later in Glengormley (six miles from Belfast); ed. Skegoneil Primary school, where he was a gifted young chorister; with his cousin Conacht, played with an unloaded revolver of his uncle, a member of B Specials; progressed to Royal Belfast Academical Institute, where he was taught by John Boyle, a Dubliner, a TCD graduate, and member of the NI Labour Party; acquired reading habits (Dylan Thomas, Huxley) and won Forrest Reid Memorial Prize with the Dylanesque poem “The power that gives the water breath”; failed an eye-test for the Navy (‘tried for the Merchant Navy’); winner of Forrest Reid Poetry Award, 1958 [aetat. 17];

Belfast Academical Institution was founded by public subscription in 1814 with support of both Anglican and Presbyterian grandees and commoners. The moving spirit was William Drennan (q.v.), a former United Irishman. The architect was Sir John Soane, best-known for the Bank of England, who provided his plans gratis. The Institution received its royal title in 1831 - though recently that title has been deleted in view of cross-community concerns. From the outset the school represented the idea of educating the Belfast middle-class and hence achieving social reform by non-revolutionary means. In spite of the ecumenical ideas of its founders and successors it became a predominantly Presbyterian Grammar School which is known as Inst and its pupils and graduates as Instonians - with a record for high achievement in the Empire, the Indian Civil Service, and the professions. The school prides itself on not losing one day during the Northern Irish Troubles.

entered Trinity College, Dublin, 1960 on a British Education Grant ‘leaving one life altogether and stepping into another’); studied English, French and Philosophy; grad. BA in French Hons., 1965; with Michael Longley (‘Are you Longley? Can I borrow your typewriter?’); ed. and contrib. to Icarus, the TCD undergraduate magazine (fnd. Alec Reid), reviewing MacNeice’s Solstice in 1961; experienced near-drowning episode at Trinity [called attempted suicide]; contrib. to Dublin Magazine, with Eavan Boland, Brendan Kennelly and others; sent down from TCD for non-attendance (and twice readmitted); passed a year at Sorbonne in Paris, reading Camus, Sartre and Pascal, inter al. - and living the café life; completed Mod. Lang. degree, but did not attend Commencements; shared Eric Gregory Award with Michael Longley, 1965 - with Twelve Poems (1965), a Belfast Festival pamphlet; travelled in USA via Canada, arriving in Cambridge, Mass. 1966; began seeing Doreen Douglas, his future wife, 1967; issued Night-crossing (1968); co-fnd. Atlantis (1970-74) with Seamus Deane and W. J. McCormack; published Ecclesiastes (1970);

m. Doreen - a native of Portballintrae whom he met at TCD and who became a news announcer on Ulster Television [UTV; d. 2010 - remaining married to Mahon], with whom children Kate and Rory; worked on London papers and magazines from 1970, including Features Ed. at Vogue; lived off Cambden Hill Rd., Kensington, W8, between Holland Park and Hyde Park (‘15 minutes in each direction’); issued Lives (1972); ed. The Sphere Book of Modern Irish Poetry (1972), which he regards as ‘hack-work’; moved to rural Surrey with his family, 1975; issued The Snow-Party (1975), winner of Denis Devlin Award, 1975; worked for the BBC and sundry journals; made TV adaptations of Jennifer Johnston, John Montague, Elizabeth Bowen, and completed translation versions of French and Greek classics; separated from Doreen largely due to drinking;

appt. writer-in-residence at New University of Ulster [NUU], 1978-79, renting rooms in Craigvara House, overlooking the coast nr. Portrush; experienced deepening alcohol problems (‘the year / of the black nights’); reuniting with Doreen for a time; issued his first selected volume as Poems, 1962-1978 (1979); issued The Sea in Winter (1979), a pamphlet-collection; briefly worked as Poetry Editor at New Statesman in the 1980s; issued Courtyards in Delft (1981), reflecting an interest in paintings of de Hoog, Munch, and Uccelli (“Hunt by Night”); adapted Cyrano de Bergerac for Stephen Rae at the National Theatre; trans. Gerard de Nerval’s The Chimeras (1982); issued The Hunt by Night (1982); trans. Molière’s The School for Husbands, as High Time (Field Day 1984), set in a Georgian house in Ireland [Gallery edn. prod. date 27 Nov. 1985], also Molière’s School for Wives (1986); issued Antarctica (1985), a new collection; friendship Patricia King, to whom his Selected Poems (1991) are dedicated - and to whom a section in The Hudson Letter is addressed;

formally received his TCD degree at Commencements in 1986 and became the first Writer Fellow there in that year; wrote a Masters degree[?]; winner of Scott-Moncrief Prize with his trans. of Selected Poems of Philippe Jaccottet (1988), the Swiss-French poet; co-ed. with Peter Fallon The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1990), largely in response to Paul Muldoon’s Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Verse (1986) - in which six out of ten poets were from Northern Ireland; appt. resident interviewer on Irish Times ‘Week-End’ literary section, 1986-early 1990s; moved to Kinsale, 1986-88; moved to New York, living in Greenwich Village and served as Irish Times NY Correspondent, 1993-96; received teaching hours at NYU and Columbia (‘a full-time writer on a stipend’); edited a special Franco-Irish issue of Poetry Ireland (Winter 1989);

Mahon in NY: [‘Short the time left to find the serenity which for a lifetime has eluded me ... a rented “studio apartment” in New York, five blocks from the river, time to think and work, long suffering friends and visitors, the bars where Dylan Thomas spent his final hours, God rest him’] (The Hudson Letter)

issued Selected Poems (1991), winner of The Irish Times Literature Award (Poetry), 1992 - containing much-revised versions (‘I tried to manufacture belatedly a homogeneous voice’); winner of The Irish Times-Aer Lingus Poetry Prize, 1992; received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a TCD DLitt, 1995; produced a version of Euripides’ Bacchae and of Racine’s Phaedra (Phèdre; orig. after Euripides’ Hyppolytus), reduced from five acts to two, and produced at the Gate with Dearbhla Molloy in the title role (1996); divided his time between Fitzwilliam Sq., Dublin, and New York, settling in Dublin again in 1996, renting in a top-floor flat on Fitzwilliam Square where the psychiatrist Anthony Clare occupied ground-floor consultancy rooms; edited a writer’s issue of Ireland of the Welcomes for Bord Fáilte; issued The Yellow Book (1997), based on epistolary style of Juvenal;

received American Ireland Fund Literary Award and the Martin Toonder Award; elected member of Aosdána; his papers cumulatively collected at Emory University (Atlanta), under auspices of Stephen Enniss (special collections librarian); Mahon’s Collected Poems appeared in November 1999; re-settled in Kinsale with his partner Sarah Iremonger [b.1965, Dublin], an installation artist co-founder of Sirius Arts Centre, Kinsale; with whom a dg., Maisie [q.d.]; issued Harbour Lights (2005), winner of The Irish Times Poetry Award, 2006; awarded the £40,000 David Cohen Prize for Literature, a lifetime award usually given to novelists, March 2007 and himself selected Peter Fallon of Gallery Press for the Clarissa Luard Award (worth £12,500) as part of the winner’s entitlement; gave a masterclass in poetry at the Irish Writers’ Centre on 27-28 Jan. 2007;  refused both the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and an OBE during the government of Tony Blair; collaborated with Iremonger on Horizons, 2014-20;

issued Homage to Gaia (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2008), containing “Climate Songs”, written after a trip to India [‘You will prevail of course / If in a different form; / We go from bad to worse / Just trying to keep warm’]; issued Life on Earth (Nov. 2008), winner of the Irish Times Poetry Award, March 2009; also incl. on international shortlist of the Griffin Poetry Prize, 2009; subject of a bio-documentary (Derek Mahon: The Poetry Nonsense, 2009), dir. Roger Greene; issued An Autumn Wind (2010), which includes poems for Heaney, Longley, Simmons and Montague; his New Collected Poems, ed. by Terence Brown and Michael Longley, issued by Gallery, May 2011; a critical biography by Enniss appeared as After the Titanic (2014) - not entirely well-received by the poet; issued a new collection, Against the Clock (2018), launched by Gallery at Kilkenny Castle, 18 Aug. 2018; his poem ‘Everything is Going to Be All Right” was read on RTE on the night of Government Covid Lockdown, 27 March 2020; d. Friday, 1 Oct. 2020, at home in Kinsale [aetat. 78]; Washing Up (2020) was his last collection.

an exhibition of his papers at TCD Library entitled Derek Mahon: Piecing Together the Poet, jointly planned for his 80th birthday by Emory and TCD, was opened on that day, 23 Nov. 2021; a collection of essays from 30 writers was issued by Gallery Press as Autumn Skies (2021). ORM HAM FDA OCIL DIL/2

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Early publications incl. ‘Late Night Walk’ [poem], in Dublin Magazine (Summer 1965); ‘Two Poems”, in Dublin Magazine (Spring 1966), p.68 [“Spring Letter in Winter”; and “Recalling Aran”: ‘I clutch the memory still, and I / Have measured everything with it since’]; also in this issue, “Canadian Pacific”, a poem on emigrants; Poems, “April on Toronto Island”, and “Parapeople”, in The Dublin Magazine, Vol. 6 No. 2 (Summer 1967), p.18.

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Bibliographical details

Modern Irish Poetry, ed. by Derek Ma]hon (London: Sphere Bks. 1972), 250pp. - CONTENTS: Introduction [11]; G W Russell 1867--1935 [31]; Thomas MacDonagh 1878-1916 [41]; Thomas MacGreevy 1893-1967 [55]; The Planters Daughter [61]; 27 [64]; John Lyle Donaghy -1902-1946 [71]; Francis Stuart -1902 [79]; Charles Donnelly -1914-1937 [151]; Padraic Fiac -1924 [157]; Pearse Hutchinson -1927 [163]; Thomas Kinsella -1929 [169]; John Montague -1929 [177]; Tom MacIntyre -1933 [187]; James Simmons -1933 [-193]; Brendan Kennelly -1936 [203]; [Patrick Kavanagh -1905-1967 [91]; Padraic Fallon -1905 [103]; Samuel Beckett -1906 [111]; John Hewitt -1907 [127]; W R Rodgers -1909-1969 [137]; Brian O’Nolan -1911-1966 [145]; Michael Longley -1939 [213]; Derek Mahon -1941 [225]; Eilean Ni Chuilleanain -1942 [231]; Hayden Murphy -1945 [239]; Paul Muldoon -1951 [245].

Light Music (Ulsterman Publications 1977; ed. Frank Ormsby), 23ppp. [20 haikus]; this contains twenty epiphanic sets of short verse with variations from those printed in the Selected Poems (1991), incl. omission of 3. Portrush; addition of 3. Negatives; omission of 4. Donegal; renaming of 7. Walking the Boy as 7. Rory; reordering of 9. Aesthetics as 5. Aesthetics; revision of 10. Mozart to 14. Mozart [ ‘Float art out over/the dark field/and moonlit outhouses.//Turn it up so they can hear/on the other planets’, to ‘The Clarinet Concerto/in A, K.622,/the second movement,//turn it up [... &c.]; 13. Joyce in Paris; renaming of 14. Come in, as 16 Enter; omission of 15. Magritte; 16. Spring, 1, Astronaut; reordering of 18. Byzantiaum as 12. Byzantium; addition of 19. East Strand; 20. Plane; 21. Absence; 22. Night; 23. Dark Edge; 24. Haven; 25. Fly-life; 26 Bluebells; 27. Loft; 28. Waterfront; 29. Outside; 30. Donegal; 31. Vertical; 32. Rogue Leaf; 34. Flying; renumbering of 20. Revelation as 33. Revelation. [End.]

In Their Element: Seamus Heaney & Derek Mahon ([Belfast:] NI Arts Council 1977), pamphlet [18pp.]; contains poems by Heaney [q.v., & see under Works, infra], and poems by Mahon: “Girls in their Seasons”; “In Carrowdore Churchyard”; “Death of a Film-star”; “An Unborn Child”; “In Belfast”; “Edvard Munch”; “A Dark Country”; “After Cavafy”; “Afterlives” [ded. James Simmons] 2; “The Snow Party”; “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”; “Ford Manor”; “Penshurst Place”; “The chair squeaks ...”. The poems were read at Belfast; Irvinestown; Omagh; Londonderry; Magherafelt; Banbridge; Ballycastle, 23-19 May.

The Hunt by Night (London: OUP 1982; Wake UP, 1983), 63pp.[ded. ‘In memory of J. G. Farrell, 1935-1979’; Poetry Book Society Choice]; contains Courtyards in Delft (for Gordon Woods); Derry Morning; North Wind: Portrush; an Old Lady; Rathlin Island; Brecht in Svendborg; Knut Hamsen in Old Age; The Andean Flute; At the Pool; Tractatus (for Aidan Higgins); Morning Radio; Rock Music; The Dawn Chorus; Table Talk; Another Sunday morning; The Hunt by Night; Girls on the Bridge; Brighton Beach (for Paul Smyth); How to Live; Ovid in Tomis; A Lighthouse in Maine; The Joycentenary Ode; A Postcard from Berlin (for Paul Durcan); One of these Nights; The Terminal bar; from The Drunken Boat; A Garage in Cork; The Woods; The Eart; The Globe in North Carolina.

Lives (London: OUP 1972), 39pp.[‘for my father and mother’; title poem ded. Seamus Heaney]; contains Homecoming; A Dying Art; Ecclesiastes; Edvard Much; In the Aran Islands; Rocks; Night Song; An Image from Beckett (for Doreen Douglas); The Last Dane; (for Tom and Peggy MacIntyre) The Archaeologist (for Hugh Maxton [W. J. McCormack]; J. P. Donleavy’s Dublin; Lives (ded. Seamus Heaney); Deaths; A Dark Country; Folk Song; A Tolerable Wisdom; Job’s Comforter; Rage for Order; After Cavafy; As It Should Be; What Will Remain; Consolations of Philosophy (for Eugene Lambe); Gipsies Revisited (for Julian Harvey); Entropy; I am Raftery; Beyond Howth Head; Notes on Beyond Howth Head; note that an epigraph from Pascal is added to the pamphlet publication: ‘Il faut partir. Cela n’est pas volontaire. Vous êtes embarqué’.

Selected Poems 1962-1978 (London: Viking: Oldcastle, Co. Meath [Ireland] Gallery Press in assoc. with OUP 1979), 194pp. [; ded., ‘for Doreen; and for Rory and Katherine when the time comes’; contains Glengormley; The Poets of the Nineties; In Carrowdore Churchyard; The Spring Vacation; Grandfather; My Wicked Uncle; The Death of Marilyn Monroe; Preface to a Love Poem; Bird Sanctuary; A Mythological Figure; De Quincey at Grasmere; Breton Walks; Van Gogh in the Borinage; The Forger; Jail Journal; Day Trip in Donegal; September in Great Yarmouth; An Unborn child; the condensed Shorter testament; Girls in their Seasons; Canadian Pacific; Epitaph for Robert Flaherty; April on Toronto Island; Thinking of Inishere in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Homecoming; A Kind of People; The Poets Lie Where They Fell; A Dying Art; Ecclesiastes; Teaching in Belfast; Bruce Ismay’s Soliloquy [on the Titanic]; The Studio; In the Aran Islands; Rock; Two Songs; A tolerable Wisdom; An Image from Beckett; The Early Anthropologists; Lives; Deaths; Rage for Order; Poem Beginning with a Line by Cavafy; As it Should Be; A Stong Age Figure Far Below; Consolations of Philosophy; Gipsies; Entropy; I am Raftery; Dog Days; Beyond Howth Head; Afterlives [ded. James Simmons]; Leaves; Father-in-law; Homage to Malcolm Lowry; Going Home; The Snow Party; The Last of The Fire Kings; The North African Campaign; The Golden Bough; The Antigone Riddle; The Facts of Life; Nostalgias; The Mute Phenomena; Matthew V. 29-30; A Refusal to Mourn; Postcards; The banished Gods; A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford; Ford Manor; Penshurst Place; Three Poems after Jaccottet; Surrey Poems; Soles; Jet Trail; Autobiographies; Light Music; The Return; The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush; The Blackbird; The Old Snaps; The Attic; The Poet in Residence; Everything is Going To Be All Right; Heraclitus on Rivers; The Window; The Sea in Winter [index of first lines]. Acknowl. to Aquarius, New Statesman, Poetry Review, Honest ulsterman, Hibernia, Irish Times, New Irish Writing, Ciphers, Magill, and Ploughshares.

Selected Poems (Viking/Gallery in assoc. OUP 1991; rep. 1993), 194pp. [ded. ‘For Rory and Katie’], contains In Carrowdore Churchyard (at the grave of Louis MacNeice), Glengormley, Grandfather, Preface to a Love Poem, De Quincey in Later Life, Four Walks in the Country Near Saint-Brieuc [Morning, Man and Bird, After Midnight, Exit Molloy]; The Forger; A Portrait of the Artist (for Colin Middleton); Day Trip in Donegal; An Unborn Child (for Michael and Edna Longley); Canadian Pacific; Thinking of Inis Oírr in Cambridge, Mass. (for Eamon Grennan); Homecoming; A Dying Art; Ecclesiastes; After the Titanic [formerly Bruce Ismay’s Soliloquy]; The Studio; Aran; Two Songs; A Tolerable Wisdom; An Image from Beckett (for Doreen); Lives (for Seamus Heaney); Death; As it Should Be; A Stone Age Figure Far Below (formerly ‘The Archaeologist’; for Bill McCormack); Consolations of Philosophy (for Eugene Lambe); Gipsies; beyond Howth Head (for Jeremy Lewis); Afterlives (for James Simmons); Leaves; Dream Days; Nostalgias; Father-in-Law; Homage to Malcolm Lowry; The Snow Party (for Louis Asekoff); The Last of the Fire Kings; A Refusal to Mourn; A Disused Shed in Co. Wicklow; The Mute Phenomena (after Nerval); Light Music [34 haiku]; Midsummer; Ford Manor; Penshurst Place; How to Live; Ovid in Love; from The Drunken Boat (after Rimbaud); three Poems by Philippe Jaccottet (The Voice; Ignorance; Words in the Air); Soles; Autobiographies; A Kensington Notebook [4 pts.]; Going Home (for John Hewitt); The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush; Rock Music; The Blackbird; The Attic (for John and Evelyn Montague); The Old Snaps; Dawn at St. Patrick’s; Beyond the Pale (after Corbière); Everything is Going To Be All Right; Heraclitus on Rivers; The Sea in Winter (for Desmond O‘Grady); ‘Songs of Praise’; Courtyards in Delft; Rathlin; Derry Morning; North Wind: Portrush; an Old Lady; Old Roscoff; Brecht in Svendborg; Knut Hamsun in Old Age; The Andean Flute; Tractatus (for Aidan Higgins); Katie at the Pool; the Dawn Chorus; Morning Radio (for John Scotney); Table Talk; Another Sunday Morning; A Lighthouse in Maine; St. Eustace; The Joycentenary Ode; A postcard from Berlin (for Paul Durcan); One of these Nights; A Garage in Co. Cork; The Woods; Craigvara House; The Terminal Bar; After Pasternak (White Night; The Earth); The Globe in North Carolina; Squince; Mt. Gabriel; Tithonus; Girls on the Bridge; The Hunt by Night; Brighton Beach; Achill; Ovid in Tomis; October in Hyde Park; Dejection; Night Drive; Antartica; Kinsale; Death in the Sun (Albert Camus 1913-1960).

The Yellow Book (Oldcastle: Gallery 1997), 57pp. CONTENTS: Landscape page [11]; I. Night Thoughts [12]; II. Axel’s Castle [14]; III. At the Shelbourne [16]; IV. ‘shiver in your tenement’ [18]; V. Schopenhauer’s Day 20]; VI. To Eugene Lambe in Heaven [23]; VII. An Bonnan Bui 26]; VIII. Remembering the ‘90s 28; IX. At the Gate Theatre 30; X. The Idiocy of Human Aspiration 33; XI. At the Chelsea Arts Club [35]; XII. Aphrodite’s Pool [37]; XIII. Dusk [39]; XIV. Rue des Beaux-Arts [41]; XV. Smoke [44]; XVI. America Deserta [46]; XVII. The World of J. G. Farrell [49]; XVIII. Death in Bangor [51]; XIX. On the Automation of the Irish Lights [54]; XX Christmas in Kinsale [56]. The epigraph is from Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave [Palinurus:] ‘To live in a decadence need not make us despair; it is but one technical problem the more which a writer has to solve.’

Against the Clock (Oldcastle Gallery 2018), ded. For Sarah; publ. 17 Aug. 2008]; - CONTENTS: Against the Clock [11];; Horizons [13]; Bridges 14]; The Flying Boarts [15]; Ninth Wave [16]; Palinurus [17]; Montaigne [17]; At the Strand Cafe/ [19]; Olympia [20]; A Clearing [21]; Dead of Night [22]; Botany [23]; At the Window [24]; Jersey and Guernsey [25]; Rain Shadows [27]; Working Conditions [30]; Stuff [31]; Data [32]; Ebb Tide [33]; To Anne Bronte [34]; A Birtday [35]; Mythistorema [36]; Rising Late [38]; A Bright Patch [40]; A Full Moon in May [42]; Stardust [44]; Howe Strand [45]; Homage to Joseph Kell [47]; Cork in Old Photographs [48]; The Rain Forest [49]; Triad for Shane MacGown [51]; - 1. A Rainy Night in Soho; 2. Fairytale in New York; 3. Brought Up to Agitate; To Hugh Haughton Retiring [53]; An age of Revolution [54]; On a Drowned Girl [55]; On Swimming in Lakes and Rivers [56]; Brave New World [58]; Ophelia [61]; Ivy )63]; Being a Dog [65]; Thing Theory [67]; Salisbury Avenue [69]; A Dove in the House [70]; A North Light [72]; Domestic Interior [74]; Woodpigeons at the Grove [76]. Acknowledgements [79]. (Available at Gallery Press - online; accessed 17.05.2022; see full-paged extract of “Olympia” and “A Clearing” - infra.)

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Bibliographical details
Hugh Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon (Oxford UP 2007), 384pp., ill. [9 halftones], CONTENTS: 1. Introduction: The Poetics of Home; 2. ‘Forging an identity: Night-Crossing’; 3. ‘The Ironic Conscience: Lives’; 4. ‘The Poetry of afterlives: The Snow Party’; 5. ‘Writing Crisis: The Sea in Winter’; 6. ‘The Time of Exile: The Hunt by Night’ and Antarctica’; 7. ‘Poet in New York: The Hudson Letter’; 8. ‘The Yellow Book’ and the Fin de Siècle’; 9. A New Wave: ‘Harbour Lights.’ Apparatus incls. ‘Derek Mahon: An Inventory of Poems’ [383]; available at Google Books - online.] (Note OUP page citing 9 Dec. 2010 as date of pub.; - online; COPAC lists 2007 and vii, 402pp. - online.)

Cover-photo by John Minahin

Irish University Review, ‘Derek Mahon Special Number’, ed. Brian Donnelly, 24, 1 (1994), CONTENTS: Catriona Clutterbuck, ‘“Elpenor’s Crumbling Oar”: Disconnection and Art in Derek Mahon’, pp.6-26; Peter Denman, ‘Know the One? Insolent Ontology and Mahon’s Revisions’, pp.27-37; Terence Brown, ‘Derek Mahon, The Poet and Painting’, pp.38-50 [JSTOR - online]; Michael Longley, ‘The Empty Holes of Spring: Some Reminiscences of Trinity Days & Two Poems Addressed to Derek Mahon’, pp.51-57 [Incls. poems, “Birthmarks for D.M.” [... &c.]; Eavan Boland, ‘Compact and Compromise, Derek Mahon as a Young Poet’, pp.61-66; Kathleen Shields, ‘Derek Mahon’s Poetry of Belonging’, pp.67-79; Bill Tinley, ‘“Harmonies and Disharmonies”, Mahon’s Francophile Poetics’, pp.80-95; John Redmond, ‘Wilful Inconsistency: Derek Mahon’s Verse-Letters’, pp.96-11; Christopher Murray, ‘“For the Fun of the Thing”: Derek Mahon’s Dramatic Adaptations’, pp.117-130; Jody Allen-Randolph, ‘Derek Mahon, A Bibliography’, pp.131-56 [incl. 400+ items of lit. journalism].

Kathleen Shields, ‘Derek Mahon’s Poetry of Belonging’, Irish University Review, 24, 1 (1994), 67-79: Bibl., Edna Longley on Derek Mahon, Fortnight, 211 (Dec. 1984- Jan 1985), pp.17-18; Stan Smith, Inviolable Voices, pp.188-92; Edna Longley, ‘Louis MacNeice: “The Walls are Flowing”, in Across the Roaring Hill, ed., Dawe & Longley (Belfast: Blackstaff 1985), p.99; Basil Payne, Studies, 58 (Spring 1969), p.76; Philip Hobsbaum, ‘Derek Mahon’, in Contemporary Poets, ed. James Vinson (St. James’ Press 1975), p.985; Gerald Dawe, Sweet Discourses, Honest Ulsterman, 69 (June-October 1981), p.67; Maurice Harmon, [q.t.,] Irish University Review, 12, 1 (Spring 1982), p.103; Neil Corcoran, ‘Flying the Private Kite’, Times Literary Supplement (18 Feb. 1983), p.160.

Joris Duytschaever, ‘History in the Poetry of Derek Mahon’, in Duytschaever and Geert Lernout, eds., History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature [Costerus Ser. Vol. 71] (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1988), pp.97-109, cites the following Brendan Kennelly, ‘Lyric Wit’, Irish Times ( 22 Dec. 1979); Aidan C. Mathews, ‘Winter Quarters for a Poet-exile’, Irish Times (Feb. 19 1983), [q.p.]; Edna Longley, review of Night-Crossing, in Honest Ulsterman, 8 (Dec. 1968), pp.27-29; Edna Longley, ‘The Singing Line: Form in Derek Mahon’s Poetry’, in Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1986), pp.170-84; Dillon Johnston, Irish Poetry After Joyce (Notre Dame UP; Dublin: Dolmen 1285); Seamus Heaney, Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland (Trustees of Dove Cottage 1985); Paul Durcan, ‘The Work of Derek Mahon’, Magill (Christmas 1984), p.43; Terence Brown, ‘An Interview with Derek Mahon’, Poetry Ireland Review, 14 (Autumn 1985), pp.16-17.

Peter Fallon, ed., Autumn Skies: Thirty Writers on Poems by Derek Mahon (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2021) - published on what would have been Derek Mahon's 80th birthday (23 Nov. 2021); essays by John Banville, Sara Berkeley, Ciaran Berry, Rosita Boland, Gerald Dawe, Seamus Deane, Peter Fallon, John FitzGerald, Tom French, Eamon Grennan, Vona Groarke, Andrew Jamison, Seán Lysaght, Aifric Mac Aodha, John McAuliffe, Thomas McCarthy, Medbh McGuckian Frank McGuinness, Audrey Molloy, Paul Muldoon [rep. in The Irish Times, 23 Nov. 2021 - as infra; and copy as attached], Caitríona Ní Chléirchín, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, Bernard O’Donoghue, Michelle O’Sullivan, Peter Sirr, Gerard Smyth, Colm Tóibín, and Grace Wilentz. Grant-aided by the Arts Councils of Ireland.

[Gallery Press notice quotes Seán Hewitt (Irish Times) - ‘Autumn Skies, a collection of 30 brief essays by 30 writers responding to a chosen Mahon poem, was originally intended to celebrate the occasion of the poet&146;s 80th birthday, but serves now as a memorial tribute. With the poems reprinted alongside the essays, the book acts as an excellent introduction to Mahon’s work, surveying both classic poems (“Afterlives”, “A Disused Shed in Co Wexford”, “Harbour Lights”) and lesser known works. Some of the essays (such as John Fitzgerald on “The Sea in Winter”) admit to a fondness for earlier versions of poems that Mahon later revised, testifying to the arresting power of the first encounter.’ (Gallery Press - online; accessed 23.01.2023.)

Note: Reading Ireland: The Little Magazine (Fall/Winter 2022) with Mary O’Malley as special editor is devoted to Mahon.

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References
Edward Lucie-Smith, ed., and intro., British Poetry Since 1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1970), incls. ‘My Wicked Uncle’, ‘An Unborn Child’, with the introductory remark, ‘Derek Mahon’s work is close to Heaney’s in style, and shows much the same influences, and the same high level of technical accomplishment.’ (pp.342-45).

See-and-Hear: Derek Mahon is included in the See-And-Hear site of the Griffin Poetry Award, of which he was a winner - online [scroll down far]. The poem given is “Dirigibles” from Life on Earth (2008) - see text, attached.

Blake Morrison & Andrew Motion, eds., The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1982), contains “Afterlives”, “Ecclesiastes”, “Lives”, “A Refusal to Mourn”, “the Last of the Fire Kings”, “The Banished Gods”, “Leaves”, “The Snow Party”, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” (pp.69-80).

Peter Fallon & Seán Golden, ed., Soft Day: a miscellany of contemporary Irish writing, ed. (Notre Dame/Wolfhound 1980), contains “Ford Manor”; “Penshurst Place”; “Please”; “The Return”. Surrey Poems.

The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, gen. ed., Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3, selects poems - from Night Crossing: “Glengormley”, “In Carrowdore Churchyard [to Louis MacNeice], “A Portrait of the Artist”, “Thinking of Inishere in Cambridge, Mass.”; from Lives: “Ecclesiastes”, “An Image of Beckett”; “I Am Raftery” [omitted from Selected Poems, 1991]; from The Snow Party: “The Mute Phenomenon”, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”; from Poems 1962-1978, “The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush”; from The Hunt by Night, “The Globe of North Carolina”, “Courtyards in Delft”, and “Derry Morning”. REMS at 633n 648, 652, 1311-12; 1315; 1371, 1375; BIOG 1434 [no criticism cited].

Patrick Crotty, ed., Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1995), selects “A Dying Art” [253]; “Ecclesiastes” [254]; “An Image from Beckett” [254]; “Lives” [256]; “The Snow Party” [258]; “A Refusal to Mourn” [259]; “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” [261]; “Courtyards in Delft” [263]; “Rathlin” [264]; “Tractatus” [265].

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Catalogues
Hibernia Books 19, [20], lists ‘Dog Days’, [as] Poem on the Underground (London: Faber/British Library [n.d.]); ‘Irish Issue’, Poetry Review, Vol. 81, No. 2 (Summer 1991), ‘Derek Mahon Interviewed’, also review of Mahon, Heaney, Longley, et al.; Rhinoceros, 3 [n.d.], Translations: an interview with Derek Mahon, also Carson, Ginsberg, Holub.

Book titles to 1994: Beyond Howth Head (Dublin: Dolmen; London: OUP1972), 16pp. [0 19 647583 X]; Lives (London: OUP 1972) [[19 211816 1]; The Snow Party (London: OUP 1975) [0 19 211850 1]; Light and Music (Ulsterman Publ. 1977), 23pp.; Selected Poems 1962-1978 (London: OUP 1979) [0 19211 897 8]; Courtyards in Delft (Dublin: Gallery Press 1981) 0 90401 119 4]; The Hunt by Night (London: OUP 1982; N. Carolina: Wake Forest UP 1983) [0 19211 953 2]; Kensington Notebook (Anvil Poetry Press 1984) [0 85646 129 6]; Antarctica (Dublin: Gallery Press 1985) [0 90401 182 8]; Selected Poems (Dublin: Gallery Press/NY: Viking 1991; rep. Gallery; Penguin Internat. Poets 1993) [1-85235-062-8; 0-670-83575-7; and [0-14-058663-6]; The Yaddo Letter (Gallery Press Books) 15pp. [1-85235-083-0]; The Chimeras [after de Nerval] (Dublin: Gallery Press 1982), 20pp. [0 904011 31 3]

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Notes

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Hobsbaum’s Poetry Seminar: Derek Mahon has written to The Irish Times correcting Fintan O’Toole who - writing on Heaney’s Nobel - relates that Mahon, Longley and others ‘began writing’ in Philip Hobsbaum’s poetry seminar in QUB; Mahon and Longley ‘began writing’ with Alec Reid, the ‘late great’ teacher at TCD [and founder of Icarus]; ‘These things are more complicated than they seem.’ (dated Fitzwilliam [Sq.], 12 Oct. 1995.)

Note: Seamus Heaney was arguably responsible for the misconception in answering a question from Seamus Deane, he said: ‘I think there is a recognisable group in a literary sense. This would include Simmons, Longley, Mahon, Muldoon, and others; [...] I’m talking of a certain literary style which arose from the “well made poem” cult in English writing in the late fifties and sixties. Though harking to different writers all of us in this group were harking to writers from the English cultural background. In that sense, there is a kind of tightmouthedness which might be considered “Northern” by many in the South, but which is really the result of a particular literary apprenticeship.’ (Interview with Seamus Deane, ‘’Unhappy and At Home’, in The Crane Bag, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1977, pp.61-72.) [See further under Quotations - infra.]

Elegy on MacNeice: Michael Longley, in his preface to the Faber & Faber selection of Louis MacNeice (2001), relates how, in September 1963, he drove with Mahon and Seamus Heaney to the poet’s grave in Carrowdore churchyard. Shocked by his premature death at 55, and bereft of a father figure (Mahon being the only one of them who had met him personally), they ‘We dawdled between the graves, then signed the visitors’ book, each contemplating an elegy’, according to Mahon. When next together, Derek Mahon produced from his pocket his poem, “In Carrowdore Churchyard” and read it aloud. Heaney, according to Longley, started to recite his poem, then crumpled it up. Longley decided there and then not to attempt anything: ‘Mahon had produced the definitive elegy.’ (Related in “Sadbh” column of The Irish Times, 24 Feb. 2001 [by Caroline Walsh].)

What are friends for?: Longley cajoled by Derek Mahon into repeating Moderatorship Exams [TCD Mod.] when he walked out in a ‘brain storm’. See ‘The Empty Holes of Spring: Some Reminiscences of Trinity & Two Poems Addressed to Derek Mahon’, in Irish University Review, 24, 1 (Spring / Summer 1994), pp.52-57.

War memorial: Note that the statue in Portstewart is the subject of “In Memoriam” by Heaney (‘the loyal, fallen names on the embossed plaque’), as well as poems by Simmons, Mahon and Andrew Waterman.

Fado Yaddo: The Yaddo Letter (1992) is associated with Yaddo, the writers’ residence established by Spencer Trask and his wife Katrina, herself a poet, in Saratoga, NY State, presum. visited by Mahon. It was often visited by Elizabeth Bishop (‘“At Yaddo,” she complained, “one must produce”’ - see Claudia Roth Pierpont on Bishop in New Yorker (6 March 2017).

Desmond Fennell took issue with Mahon’s purported ownership of Racine’s Phaedra [Phèdre] and its classical antecedents, notably Seneca (not mentioned by Mahon), in a letter to The Irish Times (11 March 1996) - see under Fennell, infra.)

Tribute: Mahon contributed a poetical tribute to Seamus Heaney on the latter’s 70th anniversary, in the Heaney Supplement of The Irish Times (11 April 2009) [see under Heaney, supra.]

Brand Ireland: When Brian Cowen (Taoiseach) suggested in his speech at Clifton’s inauguration as Ireland Professor of Poetry that ‘Brand Ireland’ could ‘give us the competitive advantage in a globalised world’ while arts and culture had a ‘big role’ to play in getting us ‘back on track’ in the post-Celtic Tiger period, Clifton warned of the dangers to poetry from ‘the kind of people who have too strong an agenda’, not to mention the ‘crush of market forces’. Derek Mahon later told The Irish Times that ‘the idea of using the arts to build ‘Brand Ireland’ is very dense and philistine’ The Taoiseach’s speech was published at www.irlgov.ie. (See Déaglán de Bréadun [column], in The Irish Times, 31 July 2010, p.14 [Opinion and Analysis].)

David Gascoyne: James Fergusson (Bookseller), compiler of the library Catalogue of David & Judy Gascoyne, lists Derek Mahon, The Hunt by Night: [poems]. (Oxford University Press 1982) as Item 1186, being inscribed by the author on the half-title, “for David Gascoyne with the greatest admiration - Derek Mahon, Cambridge, ’83”. The book is available at £125 from Fergusson, 39 Melrose Gardens, London, W6 7RN (UK) - @ email.

Stephen Enniss - author of a critical biography of Derek Mahon (2014), was Director of the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library of Emory University, Atlanta - where he had studied Librarianship following a BA degree at Davidson College, and followed by a PhD at the University of Georgia. He afterwards assumed the post of Eric Weinmann Librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., and was appointed Director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, in 2013. At Emory, he spearheaded the acquisition of the papers of many contemporary Irish poets including Mahon and Seamus Heaney as well as forming archives of Ted Hughes and Salman Rushdie. He also negotiated the gift of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, a 75,000-volume English language poetry library thought to be among the largest ever assembled by a single collector. Ennis wrote his book on Mahon with a bronze statue of the poet nearby as he wrote.

Note: Mahon’s custom was to take notes on a small pad which he carried with him and to drop this and other material in card-board boxes for which the Library paid him on delivery to Emory University. [See Emory News - online; accessed 24.10.2014.]

Leverhulme Fellowship: Dr. Stephen Ennis held a Leverhulme Fellowship to London University’s Schoool of Advanced Studies (SAS) during Aug. 2002-June 2003 and gave a seminar in the Dean’s Seminar Series entitled ‘“Some Rich Myth of Reconciliation”: Derek Mahon and the Poetry of Redemptive Form’ on 16th October 2002 [pub. in Agenda, Winter/Spring 2004 - infra]. In the introductory notice includes remarks about ‘Mahon's life-long preoccupation with loss and the mutable arguing that his art has its source in the persistent desire for that which is beyond all recovery.’ and adds: that Mahon’s work takes ‘the form of a restoration of personal or collective history, that is achievable only provisionally in the formal achievement of his poems’. (See SAS/Leverhulme announcement - online.)

In his report on the Fellowship, Enniss gives notice that he has discovered the very first Mahon publication in the shape of a poem issued as a Christmas greeting by the Church of St. Peters when Mahon was a young teen. those he interviewed in Belfast and Dublin about Mahon include Michael Longley, Maurice Leitch, Brendan Kennelly, Thomas [Tommy] Murtagh, Jeremy Lewis and Dorothy Singmaster. (See PDF Report - online.)

Bibl. Stephen Ennis, ‘Some Rich Myth of Reconciliation: Derek Mahon and the Poetry of Redemptive Form’, in Agenda, 40.1-3 (Winter/Spring 2004).

‘Fanatical existence’: The term is employed by George MacCartney in "Fanatical Existence v. Aesthetic Education", being Chapter 4 of Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition (London: Routledge 2004). The Taylor Francis website page offers this account of the chapter: ‘This chapter presents the asserting [sic] that Evelyn Waugh resisted what he thought to be the fashionable relativism that characterized the literature and philosophy of his day. He devised an alternative to mainstream modernist fiction. In his later fiction, however, Waugh attempted to break this circle of futility with realistic novels that offered plausible responses to what he considered the bleak assumptions of the modern world. Sunlight has the solidity of wedges and its reflection forms columnar streaks that support glass tumblers where they stand. We do not merely see this light, we feel the “fanatical existence” it radiates on everything it touches in this particular moment. On these terms, architecture is an “aesthetic education’ in the original sense of the word: it leads one out of the darkness of self-absorption and subjectivity into the awareness of the external world one shares with others, a world which requires a clear understanding of the division between subject and object.’

After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon, by Stephen Ennis (Gill & Macmillan 2014) - Liam Guilar writes in Goodreads: ‘A strange book. If you want to know where Derek Mahon was at any time in his life, this book will probably provide the answer. It will also tell you who published what and when, and who leant him money. It names the women in his life. His children. But it feels like a chronology rather than a biography. And the focus on the subject lacks the shade and tone that other people's memories and opinions might have provided. / Perhaps Mahon himself was right when he argued that his poems and prose were his autobiography and a biography was superfluous. Like most writers the most interesting thing about him was his writing. Or perhaps the fact that Ennis was writing this while Mahon was still alive and increasingly reluctant to participate, empties the biography of the kind of information you might expect. An individual has every right to decide to close the door on their past, and accept there are things that might be shameful or embarrassing, but diffident biography is almost no kind of biography at all.’ [See online; accessed 27.01.2023.]

Cf. Patricia Craig, who comments on the biography: ‘[...] Red Sails, which came into being partly as a riposte to Stephen Ennis’s life of Derek Mahon, After the Titanic (2014) - some parts of which drove the subject of the book to tear his hair. Well, as he put it in “Art and Reality”, his affectionate, ironical elegy for James Simmons: “We flinch, of course, when someone writes / our story by his different lights.”’ (See Patricia Craig, ‘Appreciation of Derek Mahon’, in Democrat [Dunbartonshire], 19 Oct. 2020 - as attached.]

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