Night-Crossing and Lives, his first collections, with their versions and translations of Villon, Breton, Rimbaud and Baudelaire, were seen as bringing a fresh idiom into Irish poetry. Most of the early writing about Mahon emphasised how glamorously well-travelled the poems were. Because of its self-reflexiveness, however, the true subject and feeling of his work is sometimes obscured. The poet tends to establish the scene and then take up his position, usually that of a passive observer, as in the following prescient lines from an early version of ‘Beyond Howth Head’:Īt heart, Mahon’s poetry is about a literary consciousness profoundly turned in on itself its deepest feeling is for the state of desire which the widening horizons of literature make possible, a desire for desire. In Mahon’s poetry, creations have more life than their creators. ‘Early Morning’ makes an important distinction between creation and work, a distinction on which his poems will continue to insist. The poem is a performance confidently carried off, and it is this confidence we react to. Ten thousand dawns like this, and is not impressed. She calls good-day, since there are bad days too,Īnd her eyes go down. The voice affects to be bored by the Creation, in the process framing a wide-angle picture, a God’s-eye view which, as in Auden’s poetry, undergoes a chastening contraction, brought about here by an old woman’s theatrical entrance: The loftiness of that ‘No doubt’ instantly lifts the passage. Slower than time, spectacular only in size. No doubt the creation was something like this – The early poems show a mesmerising assurance immediately established, for example, in the opening of ‘Early Morning’, the first section of the sequence ‘Breton Walks’: Of the Northern Irish poets who emerged in the 1960s, Mahon was the most technically gifted. It was not so obvious that the university would dominate him. It was obvious that, as a young poet, he dominated the university scene. ‘I was taken aback by the sheer verve of his idiom,’ Eavan Boland writes, ‘the attack of his syntax, his brat-pack stance as poète maudit.’ Michael Longley ‘felt overwhelmed and wanted to withdraw to a safe distance’. Fellow students who are now also famous poets have recorded how intimidating his presence, and poems, could be. He had wit, taste and a literary knowledge beyond his years his distinctiveness as a Belfast poet was crucially accentuated by his study of French literature, which Irish poets had been slow to explore. In his undergraduate days at Trinity College Dublin in the early 1960s, Derek Mahon cast a spell over his contemporaries, as he would cast a spell over his early readers.
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