Derek Mahon (1941–2020) is widely recognized as one of the most important Irish poets of his generation. This collection of new critical essays offers an important retrospective assessment of the nature of his poetic achievement. Bringing together many leading scholars of modern and contemporary Irish poetry, including a notable number of accomplished poet-critics, its contributors range widely across Mahon’s body of work. Their essays offer fresh considerations of the biographical, geographical and literary contexts that shaped his poetic voice. This includes paying attention not only to more familiar influences but also to previously little considered interlocutors. The stylistic and formal achievement of his voice is re-evaluated in ways that range from attentive close readings to considerations of his controversial practice of self-revision, and his engagements with music and experiments in translation. The politics of a poet often misleadingly considered apolitical are also reframed to take in the engagements of his early work through to the ecocritical commitment of his later poetry. Indeed, a notable aspect of this book is the consideration it gives to all the phases of Mahon’s career. As a whole, the collection opens up many new ways of reading and understanding Mahon’s important body of work.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Nicholas Grene and Tom Walker
I. Affiliations
Mahon, Coleridge, Yeats: The Given Life
Matthew Campbell
‘Hold on to that dissolving map’: Places and Displacements in Mahon and MacNeice
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
The ‘Mighty Four’ and More: Mahon and American Poetry
Philip Coleman
‘Vivid Contact’: Good Faith in the Poetry of Mahon and Boland
Catríona Clutterbuck
Mahon and Morrissey: The Thing and the Thing Made
Lucy Collins
II. Locations
‘A Worldly Time’: Mahon and Belfast
Gerald Dawe
Mahon’s New York
Lucy McDiarmid
Mahon’s Cosmopolitan Limits
Justin Quinn
III. Aesthetics
Mahon’s Defence of Poetry
Edna Longley
Twinning ‘Infinite’ with ‘Fulfilment’: Rhyme and the Paradoxes of Choice in Mahon’s Early Poetry
Adam Hanna
‘Late Listening’: Music in Mahon’s Poetry
Maria Johnston
Surfaces and Superficialities in Mahon
Gail McConnell
From France to la Francophonie: Mahon’s Translation of Unbelonging
Clíona Ní Riordáin
IV. Politics
Towards the New Atlantis: Mahon’s Early Politics
Tom Walker
Mahon’s Class Unease
Nicholas Grene
Mahon’s ‘Late Sacramental Gleam’
Seán Hewitt
‘songs to be sung beyond the human’: Mahon’s Terminal Ecologies
Sam Solnick
Late Mahon: Resistance and the Medium
Hugh Haughton
About the Author :
Nicholas Grene is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin. Tom Walker is Associate Professor in Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin.
Review :
'The 18 contributors to this collection of essays bring the poetry alive, not that there was a danger of it being forgotten. Throughout the volume, the level of respect for the author is apparent in the meticulous scholarship. The late Gerald Dawe takes us on an illuminating tour of Mahon’s Belfast. Lucy McDiarmid tracks the circuits of the poet in Manhattan in the 1990s (and makes manifest the coherence of The Hudson Letter). Relationships with music, painting, politics, class, and French and American poetries are each illuminated by people with true expertise.' Adrian Frazier, Irish Times
