Nicholas Grene and Tom Walker

Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024. 304 pages.

ISBN: 9781835537978

Any critic, hostile or appreciative, who attempts to come to terms with the work of Derek Mahon must be impressed, in the first instance, by its wide-spanning vitality, shaped by and conversant with a truly eclectic variety of literary and historical discourses. One of the virtues of this essay collection is its implicit celebration of such imaginative scope and diversity. Contributions explore the “awareness of pervasive environmental challenges” that suffuses Mahon’s writing (289), while also attending to what Matthew Campbell terms the poet’s “embrace of the Yeatsian paradox” in his later years (30) – life and work, history and art, implicating but also catalysing each other in his creative praxis. Mahon’s “syntactic grace and sonic resolution” are thus acknowledged (21), and his canonical revisions and interventions explored in detail, even as the modernity of the poems supplies a structuring motif for the volume as a whole.

In his early career, Mahon was viewed as a successor of sorts to Louis MacNeice – “both poets of elsewhere”, as Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin observes (35), whose “ironies, allusions, and qualifications” complicate the terms of identity in which each is usually bracketed (47). In his maturity, he proclaimed himself a devoted fan of Björk and Joni Mitchell (Mahon 2017: 12): singer-songwriters rarely mentioned in contextual discussions of his work. Going some way to bridge this critical gap, Nicholas Grene foregrounds the poet’s admiration for the balladry and “punk avant-garde” of Kirsty MacColl and Shane MacGowan (262), whose second name is misspelled as “McGowan”. Grene is surely correct, however, to emphasise Mahon’s consistent identification “with outsiders and outcasts, the dissolute and the disgraced”, remarking that the poet harboured a particular concern for “the urban underclass” (259). The precarity and suffering of the latter impelled Mahon’s empathy, he contends, while the “anti-establishment thrust” of their culture and social life – typified for Grene by the music of the Pogues – proved inspiring. “Lost lives”, as Seamus Deane once noted, “are Mahon’s obsession. His poetry is an attempt to fulfil them” (Deane 1985: 162).

Mahon, incidentally, regarded MacNeice as a “wild man”; a “moonstruck artist”, he wrote in an essay included in his Selected Prose, lurked always “behind the urbane exterior” (125). For all his technical panache, Mahon himself had a talent for exulting in the wild and the wildering, celebrating those spaces that remained untameable and marginal – from “Huts and Sheds” to the landscapes frequented by New York’s homeless, an “alternative polity / beneath the ostensible, pharaonic city / glimpsed through rain or dust from an expressway” (Mahon 2021: 187). Analysing his “American” poems, Caitríona Clutterbuck presents Mahon as an excursive writer, whose gifts included a compulsive willingness to explore “modernity’s vibrancy alongside its dark shadow of desolation” (68): themes that may distinguish Mahon from his immediate contemporaries, for whom the sometimes atavistic terrains of Ulster (in the case of Heaney and Longley) and the twilit clarities of suburban Dublin (in the case of Eavan Boland) were grounding locales, in memory as in life, inflecting the language and tilting the observing lens of their imaginings.

Clutterbuck’s interpretation is refreshing for stepping outside of the national (Irish) and regional (Ulster) contexts in which Mahon is often situated. It is possible that the reflexive critical comparison of his work to that of his Ulster colleagues, indeed, obfuscates as much as it reveals (Campbell 2003: 137). When Gail McConnell suggests that Mahon’s poems feature “the mind thinking, the eye looking, but not the fleshy reality of the body”, the implication seems to be that Mahon seldom wrote in the Heaney mode (214). The inverse is also true, as a cursory juxtaposition of Heaney’s “The Tollund Man” with Mahon’s likewise excavatory “Lives” will show. But the comparison itself could be questioned. The point being that Mahon, in particular, was idiosyncratic and heterodox in his cultural affinities and identifications, an aspect of his work that is not always well served by critical discussions that regard his imaginative concerns primarily through the prism of the Irish and Northern Irish poetry scenes. If his prose collections are to be believed, the films of Bergman and Costa-Gavras were as creatively central to Mahon as the literary output of his peers (and rivals) on home turf.

As a miscellany of commentaries, the volume offers a range of distinctive readings, rather than a single interpretation, and this critical diversity is itself of interest. So Seán Hewitt describes Mahon as oscillating “between past and present, lost and loss, order and disorder, nostalgia and mockery”, as he waits in anticipation of the “contemplative silence” of a spiritual-ecological revelation (271) – while Haughton, in his contribution, focuses instead on what he terms “Mahon’s ferocious critique of ecocidal global capitalism” (312). The editors also register this dimension of Mahon’s work in their introduction, arguing that “it would be absurd to call [Mahon] an apolitical poet, given his resistance to global capitalism and its destructive effects on the planet” (10).

Although one of his chosen texts, “Ovid in Tomis”, opens with the image of a “can of Coca-Cola / knocking the icy rocks” (Mahon 2021: 146) – implying that globalised commodity culture, unlike the RMS Titanic, remains tenaciously “unsinkable” – Hewitt chooses not to dwell on this intellectual dynamic in Mahon’s writing. Instead, he ascribes “a paralysing self-awareness”, “a deep-seated and complex ambivalence” towards the creative act, and a tendency towards spiritual and emotional “vacillation” to the poet, a figure troubled, Hewitt argues, by his sense of a “deprivation in rationalism”, which his poetry attempts to mend “by making room for the non-rational” (271-82). Haughton, however, convincingly bridges the critical gulf between his and Hewitt’s respective readings, acknowledging the ambivalence that Hewitt outlines while also foregrounding Mahon’s perceptual brilliance, and suggesting that the poet’s late style blends both “affirmation and critique, resistance and celebration”, to fine effect (312). “We belong to this” world, said Mahon, “not as discrete / observing presences but as born / participants in the action” (Mahon 2021: 312). Whatever spiritual paralysis he may have felt at different points in his life, he was, to the end, intellectually alert and ethically engaged, and the ecological attentions of his later poems reflect these attributes.

“Nothing to lose but our chains, our chains gone”, Mahon wrote, quoting The Communist Manifesto, while surveying “the pastiche paradise of the post-modern” society around him, saturated with “the ersatz, the pop, the phoney” (Mahon 2021: 208). Unlike the young Marx and Engels, he continued, “we seldom love or hate, as once, with a full heart” (208). Marx’s audacious incitements to social revolution also freight the language of “The History Train”, a poem stalked by “the haunting spectre of a future lost” (372), a phrase that echoes both The Communist Manifesto, once again, and the closing lines of Percy Shelley’s sonnet, “England in 1819”. Without elucidating that particular connection, Edna Longley situates Mahon “in the tradition” of Shelley’s “grand affirmation” of poetry’s ethical power, A Defence of Poetry (146). “I’m more inclined to Shelley than to Auden”, he told The Paris Review (Grennan 2000: 174).

“Every true poet speaks for poetry”, Longley notes, “But Mahon is among those poets who speak with special ‘intensity’” (146). She goes on:

Shelley both defends poetry as an art and represents it as an art of defence: defence against the worst that can happen to human civilization. For Shelley, “the extinction of the poetical principle” is “connected with the progress of despotism and superstition”. Mahon’s exiles, reprobates, and the persecuted Akhmatova confirm this connection. (146)

“Ovid in Tomis”, in fact, is one of a number of poems in which Mahon adapts Shelley to his own purposes (another is “Word to the Wise”, referencing “The Masque of Anarchy” in its call for “the ownership of the country” to be devolved “to / the people of the country, not the few” [Mahon 2021: 514]). Offering a fluent variation on themes introduced in Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and “Ode to a Skylark”, Mahon reconfigures the sound of rising birdsong as a riposte to worldly power. “I often sit in the dunes”, he writes (revising Shelley’s famous desert vista),

listening hard

to the uninhibited

viruosity of a lark

serenading the sun

and meditate upon

the transience

of earthly dominion,

the perfidy of princes. (Mahon 2021: 146)

Contrasting the “uninhibited // virtuosity of a lark / serenading the sun” to “the perfidy of princes”, these lines may also constitute a guarded literary salute to Bobby Sands, for whom, in the hunger striker’s words, “the imprisonment of the lark” was “a crime of the greatest cruelty because the lark is one of the greatest symbols of freedom and happiness” (Sands 1981: 33). “Ovid in Tomis” was first published in the winter 1983/84 issue of Stand magazine, two years after Sands’s death. Worldly, multi-faceted, and debonair, Mahon’s poetry abounds in such resonances, earthing his lyricism in the realm of moral inquiry and historical understanding.

One certainty is that Mahon’s “political sensibility”, as Tom Walker suggests, was “long-standing” (251), and not merely an aberration accompanying his later work. Derek Mahon: A Retrospective adds depth and directionality to this recognition, mapping out the various terrains over which further investigations of the poet’s oeuvre might be conducted.