New book celebrates poetic achievements of Derek Mahon

Posted on: 28 October 2024

The poetic distinctiveness of the Belfast-born Derek Mahon is celebrated in a major new book published this week. Derek Mahon: A Retrospective, edited by Nicholas Grene and Tom Walker from the School of English in Trinity College Dublin, is published by Liverpool University Press. 

Nicholas Grene, Professor Emeritus, commented: “It is just four years since Derek Mahon died in October 2020. This book takes stock for the first time of the full range of his poetry, from the wittily satiric ‘Glengormley’ through masterpieces such as ‘Courtyards in Delft’ and ‘A Disused Shed in Co Wexford’ to the last volumes with their passionate protests against the destruction of the planet.” 

The publication includes essays by his fellow poets Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin on Mahon’s relationship with Louis MacNeice, while Edna Longley examines the effects of Mahon’s lifelong practice of re-writing his poems. The book also includes an essay by the late Gerald Dawe on Mahon’s North Belfast background. The editors have dedicated the book to Dawe’s memory.  

Derek Mahon: A Retrospective also establishes the literary context for Mahon’s work, whether with English or American poetry, his interactions with his contemporary Eavan Boland or comparison with Sinead Morrissey as a younger successor. Mahon’s cosmopolitanism is analysed here in the sequence of verse letters that make up ‘New York Time’, his translations of French poetry from Villon and Baudelaire to the Francophone poets of Africa, and the intertextual allusiveness of his language. 

The book also explores Mahon’s lyric gifts, as in his exceptionally skilful and suggestive use of rhyme, the music that echoes through his poems and helps to shape them, the attention to things and their surfaces which he shares with the French poet Francis Ponge.   

Tom Walker, Associate Professor, comments: “Mahon is often considered apolitical, a misconception challenged in this volume.  His early career shows considerable engagement with contemporary politics, while his uneasy awareness of class issues is apparent throughout his poetry. From early on, also, Mahon was concerned with the environment, a concern that became dominant in his later work.” 

The three final essays in the book consider different aspects of this ecopoetry: a transcendental vision glimpsed in nature, the concept of the post-human in a world polluted by rubbish, and the various forms of resistance to global entropy afforded to the poet. 

Derek Mahon is often associated with his contemporaries, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, and many of the essays compare his work with theirs, but the book ultimately illuminates the unique distinctiveness of his talent, and the scale of his achievement, according to the editors.  

An online exhibition entitled Derek Mahon: Piecing Together the Poet was launched by Trinity College Dublin and Stuart A. Rose Library, Emory University in 2021. The exhibition features readings by Mahon himself and Stephen Rea along with specially commissioned interviews with friends and fellow poets. The exhibition also features atmospheric photographs by John Minihan. Explore the exhibition here: https://www.tcd.ie/library/exhibitions/mahon/ 

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