With three published volumes of poetry behind him—Night-Crossing (1968), Lives (1972), The Snow Party (1975)¹—Derek Mahon has now clearly emerged as one of the most talented of the present generation of Northern Ireland poets. Indeed, in the wider context of English poetry of the last ten years, his work has retained qualities that looked increasingly likely to disappear with Auden's death—qualities of wit and wry humour in poems that reveal a lively and quirky intelligence. He has early shown a technical mastery in poems where humour and a lightness of touch often combine to achieve an unexpected seriousness. Taken as a whole, one can discern in his work a preoccupation with man's spiritual loneliness and isolation which is reflected in the large number of poems that deal with individuals or groups forced by temperament or circumstances to live outside the normal social framework. At its most sombre, Mahon's verse reveals an acute awareness of the brevity of all human life and the futility and pathos of man's existence as a finite being. It is these central themes in his work that I propose to explore as well as the imaginative richness and wealth of formal skills that Mahon has brought to his task.

As a northern Irishman Mahon has, on several occasions, dealt with the state of the Six Counties in his poetry. These handfuls of poems are, in their way, as valid and moving as many of the more historically conscious probings of Seamus Heaney and John Montague, poets who have made the evolution of the province their chief concern as artists. These poems are, moreover, part of Mahon's preoccupation with the individual's sense of isolation, for in them the speaker is usually looking at events in his native place from the outside, at a safe, if uncomfortable, vantage point. In ‘Glengormley’ (Night-Crossing), a poem written before the present unrest began, Mahon celebrated the then unheroic quality of life in a Belfast suburb. The tone and humour of the opening lines recalls to mind much of MacNeice's verse: ‘Wonders are many and none is more wonderful than man / Who has tamed the terrier, trimmed the hedge / And grasped the principle of the watering can’. Ulster's mythic and violent history is alluded to in the same mock-heroic vein: ‘Now we are safe from monsters, and the giants / Who tore up sods twelve miles by six / And hurled them out to sea to become islands / Can worry us no more’. Admitting that much was lost with the passing of the more perilous ages in the country's history, he concludes:

                                                            … I should rather praise
A worldly time under this worldly sky—
The terrier-taming, garden-watering days
Those heroes pictured as they struggled through
The quick noose of their finite being. By
Necessity, if not choice, I live here too.

Viewed in retrospect, few utterances by Ulstermen can have proven so ironic given the course of events in the province over the past six years. When Mahon has confronted the troubles in his subsequent collections it has been as an exile (he has resided in England for several years) and the state of exile, of being isolated in place and time, is a condition which he explores over and over again in his verse. ‘Homecoming’ (Lives), for instance, has a lightness and springy rhythmical flow that almost conceals the full import of its admission:

Bus into town
and, sad to say,
no change from when
he went away
two years ago.
Goes into bar,
affixes gaze
on evening star.
Skies change, but not
souls change; behold
this is the way
the world grows old.
Scientists, birds,
we cannot start
at this late date
with a pure heart,
or having seen
the picture plain
be ever in-
nocent again.

But there is no mistaking the note of pain and self-reproach in the final stanzas of ‘Afterlives’ (The Snow Party) as the speaker recounts his stepping ashore in Belfast off the boat from England:

And I step ashore in a fine rain
To a city so changed
By five years war
I scarcely recognise
The places I grew up in,
The faces that try to explain.
But the hills are still the same
Grey-blue above Belfast.
Perhaps if I'd stayed behind
And lived it bomb by bomb
I might have grown up at last
And learnt what is meant by home.

This specific instance of a general feeling of being cut-off from the goings on of the majority of men occupies a central place in Mahon's poetry. In many of his best and most characteristic poems the speaker or central character is a lonely, isolated figure, an odd man out. We encounter him in all three collections, in such poems as ‘Grandfather’, ‘My Wicked Uncle’ (Night-Crossing), ‘The Last Dane’, ‘A Dying Art’ (Lives) and in ‘A Refusal to Mourn’ (The Snow Party) in which Mahon memorably recreates the life of an old man living alone in the small but telling details of his lonely existence:

But the doorbell seldom rang
After the milkman went,
And if a coat-hanger
Knocked in an open wardrobe
That was a great event
To be pondered on for hours

However, it is those characters who are totally alienated from any form of normal social life and aspirations that he has so vividly given voice to in his poetry. His affinity with Beckett in this respect is first made apparent in the fourth section of ‘Four Walks in the Country near Saint Brieuc’, entitled, ‘Exit Molloy’ (Night-Crossing):

Now at the end I smell the smells of spring
Where in a dark ditch I lie wintering—
And the little town only a mile away,
Happy and fatuous in the light of day.
A bell tolls gently. I should start to cry
But my eyes are closed and my face dry.
I am not important and I have to die.
Strictly speaking, I am already dead,
But still I can hear the birds sing on over my head.

In this short monologue Mahon has succeeded in capturing the tone of the Beckett hero, a tone of bewildered and resigned detachment from the sufferings of the body heightened by characteristic pedantry.

Life's failures appear again and again in all three of his collections. Yet, no matter how bleak or desolate man's fate seems, the verse usually displays a grim, ironic wit and humour which holds final despair at arm's length. Sometimes, however, this proves almost malicious as in the address to the poets of the ‘tragic’ generation in ‘Dowson and Company’ (Night-Crossing):

Did death and its transitions disappoint you
And the worms you so looked forward to?
Perhaps you found that you had to queue
For a ticket into hell,
Despite your sprays of laurels.
…
Then ask no favours of reincarnation,
No yearning after the booze and whores—
For you, if anyone,
Have played your part
In holding nature up to art …

But it is in the dramatic monologue that Mahon's alienated characters come most fully and convincingly to life. The monologue is a form that he has perfected and which allows his wit full play behind the mask of the speaker. ‘Legacies’, the final poem in Night-Crossing, is a case in point. This poem is a free imitation of François Villon's ‘Le Lais’ in which the poet, cold and destitute, writes a will which pours scorn on the world which has rejected him. The measure of Mahon's achievement is that he succeeds in vividly recreating the mood and spirit of the original French, a task that defeated Robert Lowell in his rendering of Villon in Imitations. Villon's eccentric character is alive in the sardonic irony and humour with which Mahon manages to impart a final touching pathos to his plight and to that of all who are destitute like himself:

Item, to her who, as I said,
So cruelly discarded me
That now I feel my senses dead
And pleasure mere vacuity—
My broken heart, empty and numb,
For her to dispose of as she chooses.
Although she treated me like scum
God grant the mercy she refuses.
Item, to master Jean Cornu
And master Ithier Marchand,
To whom some recompense is due—
My sword, as sharp as it is long,
Which at this moment lies in pawn,
That they may rescue it from thence
Before its time is overdue
And split two ways on the expense.

This poem displays fine technical control. The eight line stanza with its ‘abab’ rhyme pattern is perfectly employed, in keeping with the original, to make the narrative flow lucidly and to capture the speaker's distinctive epigrammatic wit and tone of voice:

And since I have no choice but to go
And cannot vouch for my return
(I am not above reproach, I know,
Not being cast in bronze or iron—
Life is unsure, and death, we learn,
Gives no redress in any event)
For all those whom it may concern
I make this will and testament.

In a poem like ‘Legacies’ Mahon is restoring to English poetry qualities which are rare at the present time—conversational narrative combined with wit, intelligence and humour capable of realising a deep seriousness. The fact that ‘Legacies’ and many other poems have a literary basis (often in foreign literatures) is not a limitation, as some critics and reviewers have suggested.² What is important is that Mahon almost always transcends the merely literary which can be seen to serve as starting points for his exploration of important human conditions and concerns.

The skill and ease in handling a colloquial narrative apparent in ‘Legacies’ is seen to good advantage in the long verse letter ‘Beyond Howth Head’ which concludes Lives. In this poem Mahon's wit is given wide scope. The form of the verse letter allows him to relax and to be discursive in his comments on life in general and Irish life in particular, much in the manner of Auden in his Letter to Lord Byron. Here Mahon is less intense in his view of life than in many of his other poems, although the swiftly moving narrative, carried along in neatly rounded couplets, contains a good deal of trenchant criticism of such issues as American involvement in south east Asia, the depopulation of the west of Ireland and Irish sexual morality. Yet, overall the mood is light as, for once at least, the poet has managed to put his more usual apocalyptic view of life into perspective, allowing that ‘the pros outweigh the cons that glow / from Beckett's bleak reductio’. The poem ends on a well judged note of self-mockery which succeeds in keeping its comments on life from appearing pretentious:

and here I close my Dover Beach
scenario, for look! the watch-
ful Bailey winks beyond Howth Head,
my cailín bán lies snug in bed
and the moon rattles the lost stones
among the rocks and the strict bones
of the drowned as I put out the light
on Mailer's Armies of the Night.

The lighthearted mood of ‘Beyond Howth Head’ is atypical of the prevailing atmosphere of Night-Crossing and Lives which in general create sombre visions of the human condition. This view of man's fate is extended and deepened in Lives as in ‘Gipsies Revisited’ in which the life of the homeless and social outcasts is used as a metaphor of the real fate awaiting us all, only thinly disguised by the veneer of domestic well-being. Here the speaker, addressing the gypsies, says that ‘on stormy nights our strong / double glazing groans with / fore-knowledge of death’ and admits that ‘the fate you have so long / endured is ours also’. The projected vision of the world returned to its most primitive state is one that haunts Mahon's imagination. In ‘Entropy’, ‘What Will Remain’ and ‘Consolations of Philosophy’ (Lives) he approaches the bleak and unappealing negations of Beckett's Lessness. In ‘Consolations of Philosophy’ there is neither the expected wit nor irony to relieve the macabre prediction of the suffering awaiting the decomposing dead among whom

          … a few will remember with affection
Dry bread, mousetrap cheese, and the satisfaction
Of picking long butts from a wet gutter
Like daisies from a clover field in summer.

That concluding image is finely judged to deepen the morbidity of a poem that could challenge many an Old Testament prophecy. It is the supreme memento mori of an imagination always painfully aware of the brevity of life, of human frailty and insignificance when seen in the vistas of historic time.

Such awareness, however, rarely excludes that sad, almost nostalgic note apparent in, for instance, ‘An Image from Beckett’ (Lives), a poem built upon Pozzo's anguished cry in Waiting for Godot, ‘They give birth astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more’. The speaker in this terse monologue succeeds in conveying the poignancy of loss which death awakens in the most eschatologically orientated imagination:

Our hair and excrement
Litter the rich earth
Changing second by second,
To civilisations.
It was good while it lasted;
And if it only lasted
The Biblical span
Required to drop six feet
Through a glitter of wintry light,
There is No-one to blame.

Lives also includes poems that are sheer tours de force of the imagination. Such is the title poem, a play on the doctrine of reincarnation of the body. The speaker recounts the various lives that he has lived from having been ‘a torc of gold’ to his present incarnation as, appropriately, an anthropologist. Some of the most accomplished works in the volume are characteristic of the earlier Night-Crossing in which a lonely, socially isolated character takes a dispirited look at his situation. In ‘I am Raftery’ Mahon assumes the persona of the blind, late eighteenth century Gaelic poet, Anthony Raftery, encountering the alien life-style of one of the new English universities. In it we hear again the mocking, pedantic voice of many of Mahon's suffering aliens:

I have traded in simplistic maunderings
that made me famous for a wry dissimulation,
an imagery of adventitious ambiguity dredged
from God knows what polluted underground spring.
Death is near, I have come of age, I doubt if
I shall survive another East Anglian winter.
Scotch please, plenty of water. I am reading
Joyce in braille and it's killing me.

The convoluted diction, the chilly objectivity of the speaker's assessment of his physical condition and the clever ironical joke in the last lines all bring the character vividly alive against his uncongenial surroundings.

Taken together, Night-Crossing and Lives show Mahon exploring and dramatising an attitude to life in a variety of forms. There is less a sense of development between them than a growing awareness on the part of the reader that the two parts of a single whole have been completed. In his most recent collection, The Snow Party, he has succeeded in moving far beyond the achievement of the earlier works. His central preoccupations remain the same, but there is clearly an attempt to encompass more in a wider diversity of forms and situations. Some of the poems in this collection would fit unobtrusively into either of his preceding volumes—‘Afterlives’, ‘The Gipsies’, ‘Epitaph for Flann O'Brien’, ‘September in Great Yarmouth’, ‘A Refusal to Mourn’ and the amusing concrete poem, ‘The Window’. But in the poems that give The Snow Party its distinctive mood and character there is reflected a significant deepening of the imaginative range of the earlier work.

Poems such as ‘The Last of the Fire Kings’, ‘Thammuz’, ‘Matthew V. 29-30’ and the title poem all dwell upon the inability of the individual to escape from violence. ‘The Snow Party’, based upon the travel accounts of the seventeenth century Japanese poet, Bashō,³ is a skilful juxtapositioning of an evocative scene of ceremonial elegance and calm with the reminder that ‘Elsewhere they are burning / Witches and heretics / In the boiling squares’ and that ‘thousands have died since dawn / In the service / Of barbarous kings’ whilst ‘there is silence / In the house of Nagoya / And the hills of Ise’. That an old, complex civilisation can exist side by side with barbarity and, perhaps, depends for its existence upon such bestiality is an irony which is delicately suggested here. The obvious parallel with present day Ireland comes readily to mind, a parallel which is made explicit in the next poem in the book, ‘The Last of the Fire Kings’. In this poem the use of the old Irish legend of Beltaine points to a central similarity underlying the very different cultures of Ireland and Japan.⁴ The speaker is one of the rulers whose destiny is to undergo ritual sacrifice in order that the life of his kingdom may be perpetuated. He pledges that he will break with tradition by taking his own life ‘Rather than perpetuate / The barbarous cycle’. Yet he is forced to acknowledge the justice in his people's probable refusal to allow his dreams of escape and anonymity to be fulfilled:

But the fire-loving
People, rightly perhaps,
Will not countenance this,
Demanding that I inhabit,
Like them, a world of
Sirens, bin-lids
And bricked-up windows—
Not to release them
From the ancient curse
But to die their creature and be thankful.

The metaphoric structure of these and other stanzas makes plain that the poet is confronting the present through the past. On one level it can be read as very much an ‘exile's’ poem harbouring the same feelings of guilt that we find in the concluding stanzas of ‘Afterlives’. But on the deepest level the poet is dwelling upon one of the oldest of all ironies—the perpetuation of fertility through violent death, an irony that has preoccupied his fellow Ulster poet, Seamus Heaney.⁵

The speaker in the third poem in this group, ‘Thammuz’ (a Babylonian prototype of Adonis), offers a more composed and detached view of the inevitable destruction of man and civilisation, seeing it as a sleep before the awakening of a new civilisation in which ‘Once more I shall worship / The moon, make gods / Of clay, gods of stone / And celebrate / In a world of waste / Their deaths and their return’. Each of these poems employs similar and, for Mahon, characteristic verse forms—the short, pointed stanza controlling the brief and self-contained utterance, often powerfully graphic yet simple and delicate in achieving their effects:

Once more I shall rise early
And plough my country
By first light,
At noon lie down
In a warm field
With the sun on my face,
And after midnight
Fish for stars
In the dark waters.

(‘Thammuz’)

The final poem in this group, ‘Matthew V. 29-30’, is a strange and powerful tour de force originating out of Christ's injunction to his people in the Sermon on the Mount:

And if thy right eye offend thee pluck it out, and cast it from thee … And if thy right hand offend thee cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

The speaker in this poem, cursed with a neurotic sense of wrongdoing, accepts this message literally with the ironic twist that his acute and morbid sense of guilt requires that he destroy not only his own body but all created things in order to remove the undisclosed ‘offence’. That one of his members alone should perish is patently insufficient to the demented imagination:

Erosion of all rocks
From the holiest mountain
To the least stone,
Evaporation of all seas,
The extinction of heavenly bodies—
Until, at last, offence
Was not to be found
In that silence without bound.
Only then was I fit for human society.

Whether or not this poem is intended as a serious ironic commentary on the limitations of the Christian notion of evil, it is remarkable for its horrifying and compelling force in creating a vision of self-mutilation. Its pace is breathtaking, its images nakedly explicit, and, as in so many of his monologues, Mahon manages to be grimly funny as in the case of the speaker's bafflement at his continued lack of success:

Lord, mine eye offended
So I plucked it out.
Imagine my chagrin
When the offence continued.
So I plucked out
The other but
The offence continued.
In the dark now and
Working by touch, I shaved
My head, the offence continued.
Removed an ear,
Another, dispatched the nose,
The offence continued.
Imagine my chagrin.
Next, in long strips, the skin—
Razored the tongue, the toes,
The personal nitty-gritty.
The offence continued.

Yet perhaps the most curious preoccupation in The Snow Party is the attitude to the world of inanimate objects which, because they are the paraphernalia of everyday life that we take for granted and discard after they have served their purpose, can be seen as an extension of Mahon's concern with the plight of the human outcasts in the earlier collections. These poems are not all meant to be taken wholly seriously as in ‘After Nerval’ where we are warned that the ‘great mistake is to disregard the satire / Bandied among the mute phenomena’:

                                                                                What do you know
Of the revolutionary theories advanced
By turnips, or the sex-life of cutlery?
Everything is susceptible, Pythagoras said so.

‘The Apotheosis of Tins’ is in a similar vein, one of the two delicately organised prose poems in the book, in which a tin in a rubbish heap asserts the independence of the world of objects against human ‘patronage’ and ‘reflective leisure’. This poem is skilful and clever, and Mahon is able to use the occasion to poke fun at aesthetic pretentiousness. The stilted academic jargon of the speaker, the mocking allusion to Hamlet, the threatening tone are all controlled in beautifully balanced periods:

Promoted artifacts by the dereliction of our creator, and greater now than the sum of his skills, we shall be with you while there are beaches. Imperishable by-products of the perishable will, we shall lie like skulls in the hands of soliloquists. The longest queues in the science museum will form at our last homes saying, think now, what an organic relation of art to life in the dawn of time, what saintly devotion to the notion of permanence in the flux of sensation and crisis, perhaps we can learn from them.

These poems are, admittedly, lighthearted and quirky. Yet readers who may be prepared to dismiss Mahon for entering such quaint and obscure corners of the imagination will have to pause for further reflection on the poet's imaginative processes at the final poem of this kind, ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’. This is the concluding poem in The Snow Party and in it Mahon once again brings the inanimate world to life—in this instance ‘a thousand mushrooms’ locked away in a shed of a derelict country hotel. His evocation of their plight builds up into a convincing and moving metaphor of all the persecuted and forgotten peoples in human history:

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
Save us, save us, they seem to say,
Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.

That this response to a growth of semi-decayed fungi strikes one as appropriate and unsentimental is due to the poet's success in creating the detail and atmosphere of the scene which works upon his speaker's imagination. The slow, meditative opening is both melancholy and sinister in its suggestive creation of encountering a world in a state of entropy:

Even now there are places where a thought might grow—
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter of
Wildflowers in the lift shaft,
Indian compounds where the wind dances
And a door bangs with diminished confidence

The third line perfectly captures the condition of exhaustion in the cluttered vowel and consonant sounds of ‘to a slow clock’ which halts the fluid movement of the verse. The eerie aura of desolation is achieved in the graphic image of surviving life in the wildflowers with its skilful use of strong alliteration, leading to the fine modulation of mood in the final two lines, so that ‘diminished confidence’ perfectly states the overall atmosphere of the place which will penetrate the speaker's sensibility. The condition of the abandoned mushrooms is vividly described in a series of lucid images which poignantly create a feeling of suffering and loss:

A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?
They have been waiting for us in a foetor of
Vegetable sweat since civil war days
The outside world has become for them
A keyhole rusting gently after rain.
Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew,
And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something—
A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

The delicacy and precision of observation here is wonderfully evocative of a silent, uninterrupted decay, perfectly rendered in the tentative note of the third line with its heavy pause on ‘perhaps’. The description of the human entrance upon their solitude is achieved in a paragraph of controlled dramatic force whose power makes possible the leap in the speaker's imaginative sympathy in the final stanza:

A half century, without visitors, in the dark—
Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drouth
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flash-bulb firing squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

The halting movement of the first four lines is imitative of the gradual opening of the rusted door and, along with the graphic, staccato description of the mushrooms, builds up to the climax of the moment of entry by the humans. The effect of daylight on them is skilfully caught in the paradox, ‘only the ghost of a scream’, and in the superbly judged and powerful metaphor of the following line, all of which deepens our awareness of the suffering involved in such a silent and rarefied existence—the suffering of ‘lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii’.

Most critics, even those who see Mahon's poetry as ‘tenuous stuff’, the result of a talent ‘thinning itself away into arbitrariness and whimsy’⁶ are agreed that this is an impressive achievement. Indeed, one reviewer regarded it as ‘the consummation of his writing so far, simply one of the finest poems of the decade’.⁷ Whether or not one is prepared to agree with this placing of the poem in a hierarchy—and I for one am—it is right to stress that ‘A Disused Shed’ is the culmination of Mahon's work to date and not an isolated and fortuitous success. It treats that theme that has been central to his work since Night-Crossing—exclusion from ordinary life and harrowing solitude—in a way that reveals one of the undoubted strengths of his poetry which is its ability, because of its eccentric perspectives on the world, to offer a fresh view on central human concerns.

It would be a mistake to conclude an evaluation of Mahon's poetry by claiming for it a narrow seriousness. His work is serious, as I have attempted to suggest, but it contains, too, a good deal of whimsy spiced with intellectual mockery and word play which is none too common in English poetry today. Yet, it is when this lightness, or seeming lightness, and quirky vision combine with his assured technical mastery to create a poem like ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ that the full potential of Derek Mahon's poetic talent becomes apparent.

Notes

1. All published by Oxford University Press.

2. See, for instance, Terence Brown's assessment of Mahon in Northern Voices (Gill and Macmillan, 1975). On the other hand a few critics see Mahon's cosmopolitanism as a positive feature of his work. John Montague regards his reaching ‘out towards Europe’ as the only way that contemporary Irish poetry can avoid insularity and confront the issues of the modern world. See ‘Order in Donnybrook Fair’, T.L.S., p. 313, 17-3-72.

3. Bashō's own account of this particular episode can be found in a Penguin paperback translation entitled, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (1966), pp. 75-6.

4. I was made aware that Mahon is using this legend in Douglas Dunn's review of The Snow Party in Encounter, Nov. '75, p. 80.

5. See, for instance, J. W. Forster's essay ‘The Poetry of Seamus Heaney’, The Critical Quarterly, Spring '74, p. 43.

6. Anthony Thwaite in T.L.S. review, ‘At the Point of Speech’, 7-11-75.

7. Douglas Dunn, op. cit., p. 80.