“Rage for Order” (in Lives, 1972): ‘Somewhere beyond / The scorched gable end / And the burnt-out / Buses there is a poet indulging his / Wretched rage for order- // Or not, as the / Case may be, for his / Is a dying art, / An eddy of semantic scruple / In an unstructurable sea. // He is far / from his people, / And the fitful glare / of his high window is as / Nothing to our scattered glass. // His posture is / Grandiloquent and / Deprecating, like this, / His diet ashes / His talk of justice and mother // The rhetorical device of a Claudian emperor - / Nero if you prefer, / No mother there; / And this in the face of love, death, and the wages of the poor. // If he is silent / It is the silence / Of enforced humility, / If anxious to be heard / It is the anxiety of a last word / [22] / When the drums start- / For his is a dying art. / Now watch me / As I make history, / Watch as I tear down // To build up With a desparate love, / Knowing it cannot be / Long now till I have need of his / Germinal ironies.’ (pp.22-23.)

“The Last of the Fire Kings”: ‘I want to be / Like the man who descends / At two milk churns // With a bulging string bag and vanishes / Where the lane turns / or the man / Who drops at night / From a moving train // And strikes out over the fields / Where fireflies glow / Not knowing a word of the language, // … I am through with history … I shall break with tradition and // die by my own hand / Rather than peretuate / The barbarous cycle. /

“Lives” (ded. ‘for Seamus Heaney’ in Lives; also Selected Poems, 1991, p.38), ‘First time out / I was a torc of gold [... // ....] It all seems a little unreal now, Now that I am // An anthropologist [...] I know to much / To be anything any more; And if in the distant / / Future someone / Thinks he has once been me / As I am today, / / Let him revise / His insolent ontology / Or teach himself to pray.’

“Afterlives” (ded. James Simmons, in Selected Poems, 1991, pp.50-51), ‘What middle-class twits we are / To imagine for one second / That our privileged ideals / Are divine wisdom, and that the dim / Forms that kneel at noon / In the city not ourselves’, and ending, ‘Perhaps if I had stayed behind / And lived it bomb by bomb / I might have grown up at last / And learnt what is meant by home.’

“Ovid in Tomis”: ‘What coarse god / Was the gearbox in the rain / Beside the road? / / What neireid the unsinkable / Coca-Cola / Knocking the icy rocks? / They stare me out / With the chaste gravity / And feral Pride / / Of noble savages / Set down / On an alien shore.’ (Quoted in Alan Wall, ‘Derek Mahon’s Emblem Books’, in Agenda, 33, No.3-4 (1996), pp.165-75.)

“Smoke”: ‘Autumn in Dublin; safe home from New York, / I climb as directed to our proper dark, / five flights without a lift up to the old / gloom we used to love, and the old cold. / Head in the clouds, but tired of verse, I fold / away my wind-harp and dejection odes / and mute the volume on the familiar phone / (‘… leave your number; speak after the tone’) / to concentrate on pipe-dreams and smoke-clouds.’ (The Yellow Book, 1997, p.44.)

“A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”: ‘Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel, / Among the bathtubs and washbasins / A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole. / This is the one star in their firmament / or frames a star within a star. / What should they do there but desire? / So many rhododendrons / With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud, / They have learnt patience and silence / Listening to the rooks querulous in the high woods’ [Stanza 2]; ‘They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way, / To do something, to speak on their behalf / Or at least not to close the door again. / Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii! / "Save us, save use," they seem to say, / Let the god not abandon us / Who have come so far in darkness and in pain. / We too had our lives to live. / You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary, / Let not our naive labours have been in vain!" (Stanza 6 [end].)

Extracts from The Yellow Book (1997)*

your frantic kitsch decor designed for you
by thick industrialists and twisted ministers
(‘Nature’s a bad example to simple folk’);
and yet with your wise monkeys and euphemistic ‘Dresden’ figurines,
your junk chinoiserie and coy pastoral scenes,
you too were a kind of artist, a rage-for-order freak
seting against a man’s aesthetic of cars and golf
you ornaments and other breakable stuff.
[…]’

Little soul, the body’s guest and companion,
this is a cold epitaph from your only son,
the wish genuine if the tone ambiguous.
Oh, I can love you now tht you’re dead and gone
to the many mansions in your mother’s house.
All artifice stripped away, we give you bck to nature
but something of you, perhaps the incurable ache
of art, goes with me as I travel south
past misty drumlins, shining lanes to the shore,
above the Mournes a final helicopter,
sun-showers and rainbows all the way through Louth,
cottages buried deep in ivy and rhondodendron,
ranch houses, dusty palms, blue skies of the republic
[…]

(The Yellow Book, 1997, p.51-53).

Note: *Verses written after the funeral of his mother. The phrase ‘little soul’ echoes anima parvula in Hadrian’s Song - a classical reference. See this excerpt as a Word doc. - attached.