The Poetry of Derek Mahon

As the first major book-length study of the poetry of Derek Mahon, this volume of fourteen essays represents a long overdue account and assessment of one of the foremost living English-language poets not only in Irish poetry but world-wide. The essays demonstrate the variety and complexity of Mahon’s work. It is a poetry of the ‘ironic conscience’, sceptical, sophisticated, urbane; a poetry of transit between centres and margins. It breaks with a nationalist or regionalist thematics yet remains engaged with questions of identity, ‘belonging’, tradition and history. It identifies with outsiders, mavericks, ‘the unreconciled, in their metaphysical pain’. It includes some of the best poems of the Troubles, yet reflects a basically metaphysical, universal frame of reference. It ranges widely in time and space, yet excels in the minute particularising of human experience and the phenomenal world. We are in ‘one place only’ but ‘We might be anywhere’. The poet moves from the formal intensities of the ‘well-made’ poem to experiment with mixed styles and more open, confessional and epistolary-style forms which incorporate more of the detritus of everyday life.