A journey to the poetic realm of Derek Mahon might begin at a street in Greenwich Village, one still haunted by Dylan Thomas. We could draw a line from there to the top of Hart Crane's bridge, make the requisite pivot and dip, then sail the deep Atlantic. Arriving at last on the blessed Irish soil, we might visit Wilde and Yeats, but we would stay away from lauded Heaney—yes, that is a laurel wreath crowning his head, but we shall not look. Mahon must be granted his own contemporary terrain, for unlike the more celebrated locales on any map of Irish poetry, Mahon is situated somewhere all his own. We might tread briefly the lanes of Auden and MacNeice, then follow a less traveled road through some oak-shadowed graveyards and the disused agrarian haunts of human and horse, show no remorse at heading into town, swallow our urbane irony hard, and drink, remembering:

Your great mistake is to disregard the satire
Bandied among the mute phenomena.
Be strong if you must, your brisk hegemony
Means fuck-all to the somnolent sunflower
Or the extinct volcano. What do you know
Of the revolutionary theories advanced
By turnips, or the sex-life of cutlery?
Everything is susceptible, Pythagoras said so.
An ordinary common-or-garden brick wall, the kind
For talking to or banging your head on,
Resents your politics and bad draughtsmanship.
God is alive and lives under a stone;
Already in a lost hub-cap is conceived
The ideal society which will replace your own.

These are the kinds of things that spring up in the sinfully small Collected Poems of Derek Mahon: deflowered sonnets, able-bodied villanelles, lyrics (often in rhymed couplets) of comic ruin, aggressive iambic exclamations, melancholy spaces, “terminal ironies,” and the accidental miracle or two.

While such volumes sum up, at least in part, the scope and career of an accomplished poet, a Collected Poems should also reintroduce the poet's work to those of us who have been reading it all along. It also must introduce that poet to those who have not had the chance. Those in the latter category cannot offer much credit to Mahon's publisher since the book lacks a legend that would place Mahon's work in any literary locale. Because the table of contents is nothing but a list of individual poems, making no mention of earlier, individual volumes, we can only assume that the book is arranged in the usual way—chronologically. We are told, in a sparse paragraph of back matter, that “This volume brings together, in updated form, the poems the author ‘wishes to preserve’ from the work of forty years.” Are we to infer that the author has lost interest in the little volumes that allowed him to chart those years, like Crusoe knicking off the sunsets? That Mahon's career has been split between two continents, between bouts of self-exile, is of considerable importance, but we are given little reckoning of that. We are missing all the dates, the acknowledgments, and the miscellany that make up a publishing career. We enter from page one the territory of an extremely self-reflexive artist without much hint of the topography of his artistic landscape. The point is worth belaboring only because Mahon himself is so consistently preoccupied with his chosen art and his struggles with making it. For Derek Mahon, as we will see in his poems, employs a vocational muse. Indeed, one might be tempted to call Mahon a working-class poet, if by working we refer to the grueling chain gang of literature.

Bibliographic sniping aside, the poems collected here are often magnificent. So much so that one wonders why Mahon is frequently neglected by readers in this country, where a lot of the poems were written. Mahon's life has been a divided one, though not as dramatically as Ovid's (a poet he imitates and admires). Even if exile in our age is almost always self-induced—involving little more than flights from airport to airport for reasons more personal than political—Mahon is so frequent a flyer that it becomes nearly impossible to reconcile his American and Irish homes and the personas that inhabit them. Neither landscape is quite suitable, yet Mahon seems to prefer it that way, for he gets bonus mileage out of the willed discontentment that fuels a poem like “Going Home”—a farewell to the North American continent that has the typical Mahon timbre: sweetly wry and compellingly smug. It is sung, like so many of Mahon's poems, by a kind of late-century Odysseus amused and a little bewildered by the exotic foliage: “I am saying goodbye to the trees, / The beech, the cedar, the elm, / The mild woods of these parts / Misted with car exhaust / And sawdust, and the last / Gasps of the poisoned nymphs.” He allows himself the dream of remaining in place, thriving abroad, suspecting that if he lived “Long enough in this house / I would turn into a tree / Like somebody in Ovid / … Become a home for birds, / A shelter for the nymphs, / And gaze out over the downs / As if I belonged here too.” Unfortunately he never will belong. He must endure the limbo of homelessness, especially since he finds the landscape of Ireland so colorfully inhospitable; he is returning to a place where “There are no nymphs to be seen,” where one might only hope to find, according to “Going Home,”

Rooted in stony ground,
A last stubborn growth
Battered by constant rain
And twisted by the sea-wind
With nothing to recommend it
But its harsh tenacity
Between the blinding windows
And the forests of the sea,
As if its very existence
Were a reason to continue.

The approach to Irish shores figures so prominently in Mahon's verse that if we did not know better we would think he spent most of his life teetering on the island's edge. Many of his strongest early poems are shore lyrics, and as they did for Matthew Arnold, the “naked shingles of the world” harbor enough roaring wind and erosion to leave even the most intoxicated poet sober.

Yet homecomings for Mahon are about as comforting as hangovers. Portrush, touted in brochures as “Northern Ireland's Playground,” might be just the place for others to sport in the afternoon surf and guzzle some evening pints, but in “North Wind: Portrush,” our poet claims the north wind there “works itself into the mind / Like the high keen of a lost / Lear-spirit in agony / Condemned for eternity // To wander cliff and cove / Without comfort, without love.” Other ghosts have been fortunate enough to miss this place altogether: “Prospero and his people never / Came to these stormy parts; / Few do who have the choice.” Try selling that to the tourists! Not much redeems these seaside places, and the poet's best advice is stoical and glum:

So best prepare for the worst
That chaos and old night
Can do to us; were we not
Raised on such expectations,
Our hearts starred with frost
Through countless generations?

Only a few lucky, rugged survivors might catch “in midwinter … a rare stillness” when sunlight renders “Each object eldritch-bright, / The sea scarred but at peace.” In the Ireland that leers out of Mahon's work, any reprieve from misery is temporary at best, and this fact is borne upon the landscape itself. We would recognize peace there only by counting our scars.

In the same vein “Rathlin,” an island haunted by humans since the Mesolithic era, can only be described in units of pain and degrees of howling:

A long time since the last scream cut short—
Then an unnatural silence; and then
A natural silence, slowly broken
By the shearwater, by the sporadic
Conversation of the crickets, the bleak
Reminder of a metaphysical wind.
Ages of this, till the report
Of an outboard motor at the pier
Shatters the dream-time and we land
As if we were the first visitors here.

Ravages in nature produce ravages in man; this variation on a theme by Wordsworth recurs, but Mahon jostles it gently, like a golden egg he's careful not to scramble. The enigma of the opening line is “cut short” by a Dickinson dash, and the occasional rhymes of this stanza—just a few reverberations are enough to set the blank verse ringing—show that this poet, given the chance, will tell it slant without surrendering sonic power. Even if the “whole island” is “a sanctuary where amazed / Oneiric species whistle and chatter,” Death himself is napping here. An “odd somnolent freighter” chugs on the horizon, and meanwhile

Bombs doze in the housing estates
But here they are through with history—
Custodians of a lone light which repeats
One simple statement to the turbulent sea.
A long time since the unspeakable violence—
Since Somhairle Bui, powerless on the mainland,
Heard the screams of the Rathlin women
Borne to him, seconds later, upon the wind.
Only the cry of the shearwater
And the roar of the outboard motor
Disturb the singular peace. Spray-blind,
We leave here the infancy of the race,
Unsure among the pitching surfaces
Whether the future lies before us or behind.

Mahon's particular gift, evident here, is his ability to contain concrete image and idea neatly in the slippery grasp of his own negative capability. Bundled in the echo of that first suspended scream, the last line's near platitude invokes a “dream-time” of historical myth—this remembered massacre, centuries old—that remains eerily present. In another shore lyric, “Derry Morning,” similar facts are portrayed even more drably: “For this is how the centuries work— / Two steps forward, one step back.” In “Rathlin,” at least, the bombs are allowed to have their sleep, though even the “report” of an outboard motor resurrects the sense of dread. A “long time” in Ireland is evidently not long enough.

Such subtle balancing of historical myth and the modern moment is subtle and stunning: there is little promenading of current events, and there is never the didactic harping common to “political” poems. Instead they are marked by surprising levity and a dirgelike music of conviction, as evidenced in “The Sea in Winter”:

But let me never forget the weird
facticity of this strange seaboard,
the heroism and cowardice
of living on the edge of space,
or ever again contemptuously
refuse its plight; for history
ignores those who ignore it, not
the ignorant whom it begot.

We might think again of Arnold, whose “ignorant armies clash by night,” but few poets would tackle such stately notions with couplets. Without question Mahon has earned the odd distinction of writing the best rhyming couplets in modern English. Anyone who risks reviving Pope's vogue, of course, will produce a groaner now and then, as in the vague, forced, and masterfully annoying “Beyond Howth Head”: “The wind that blows these words to you / bangs nightly off the black-and-blue / Atlantic, hammering in its haste / dark doors of the declining west.” But in the passage quoted above, the repetition of “ignores,” “ignore,” and “ignorant” within two short lines quiets the otherwise easy “not … begot,” while those mouthfuls of “facticity” and “contemptuously” further deflect attention from the rhymes. How blissfully uncheerful this Mahon can be.

We might expect that a poet so willing to pay his tithes to traditional verse would maintain an unflappable faith in form, in art's sturdy scaffolding. Not so. Highest among Mahon's eulogized deaths would count that rage for order Wallace Stevens's muse hymned beyond the genius of the sea. Mahon's portrait of the modern poet amounts to a degraded caricature; this poet cannot find a home in the mind's bejeweled Key West, and even Whitman's chilly Paumanok would be remote from the blessed wastes of Mahon's imagination. Instead of comfort Mahon's late century paean, “Rage for Order,” rests in irony:

Somewhere beyond
The scorched gable end
And the burnt-out
Buses there is a poet indulging his
Wretched rage for order—
Or not as the case
May be, for his
Is a dying art,
An eddy of semantic scruple
In an unstructurable sea.

The poet's rage, his supreme duty to construct order out of the “unstructurable” (be it the violence of Northern Ireland or the more petty vicissitudes of urban meandering), has been relegated to a graveyard for useless pursuits. Nothing as puny as “semantic scruple” will alter anything, for he is “far / From his people, / And the fitful glare / Of his high window is as / Nothing to our scattered glass.” The allusion to Larkin's transcendent lens—portal to a doubted invisible—might suggest that the poet aspires in vain, beyond his reach; but it is not ambition that renders him powerless; it is distance, the ethereal puff of a quill that flies too high:

His posture is
Grandiloquent and
Deprecating, like this,
His diet of ashes,
His talk of justice and his mother
The rhetorical
Device of a Claudian emperor—
Nero if you prefer,
No mother there;
And this in the face of love, death, and the wages of the poor.

If too far removed from these last fundamental realities, poetry will posture without poignancy. This imagined poet craves attention, but his cries are little more than solipsistic whimpers in a void: “If he is silent / It is the silence / Of enforced humility / If anxious to be heard / It is the anxiety of a last word // When the drums start— / For his is a dying art.”

This is a decidedly bleak diagnosis, especially when directed so generally at the state of modern poetry. A negative ars poetica, the poem concocts an anti-muse, then ends by directing its interrogations inward to its author. Stevens's turn from the transcendent muse to boneheaded Ramon Fernandez at the end of “The Idea of Order at Key West” is the model here. That turn, in Stevens's poem as in Mahon's, signals the moment where the poem's broader meditations are to be tested on the poem's speaker. The question is whether or not he can exempt himself from the lousy model he has proposed. What will he make of poetry—that diminished thing?

By the end of Mahon's poem, the third-person pronoun gives up the ghost, and the “I” sings its way toward a defiant collapse:

Now watch me
As I make history,
Watch as I tear down
To build up
With a desperate love,
Knowing it cannot be
Long now till I have need of his
Terminal ironies.

Mahon is both the “he” and the “I.” This tension wire is stretched across many of his poems, since Mahon implores himself to toe the line between the private, effervescent realm of the solitary intellectual and the more sordid countryside of public domain. The speaker's “desperate love” is part nostalgia and part antidote; it would constitute a heroic act to wrestle poetry back to praise, to write a pure poetry of benediction for Northern Ireland, to sing, like Stevens, a “blessed rage for order.” But there is little possibility of locating “ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds” now, as Stevens could. At the end of the road, all that remains is to write down one's “terminal ironies.” Fortunately, such ironies are more often than not fructifying for Mahon; he pours his wit into indelicate satires without ever assuming the righteous high-mindedness satirized in this poem. The center of his criticism almost always winds up being the poet himself; if he sees it as his task not to “disregard the satire / Bandied among the mute phenomena,” he allows himself no vacation from his vocation.

Any mind so colored by the impulse to satirize must contain a hall of mirrors. The deepest irony in Mahon's poems probably arises from his sense of self-criticism born of a prolonged self-exile from Ireland. Many of his poems enact the attitude of exile while dismantling any sagacious visions a life away from home might afford. Frequently this urban solitary poises himself among the usual props—a weathered desk, a single bulb illuminating enough of the poet's night, a pen cruising the page—or in the midst of quiet rooftop observations that might attune a foreign discord to music:

I wake in a dark flat
To the soft roar of the world.
Pigeons neck on the white
Roofs as I draw the curtains
And look out over London
Rain-fresh in the morning light.

“Afterlives” opens by enacting its own privacy, refreshing the mental landscape, its gaze directed outward. Almost never confessional, Mahon's mode is dramatic and epistolary. Though he seems to work best far from home, even his quietest lyrics are soliloquies designed to fall on Irish ears, poems of guilty distance bristling with responsibilities he may have shirked. “Afterlives,” broken into two sections, the first set in London and the second “going home by sea / For the first time in years,” begins with that quiet invocation quoted above but quickly gives way to the overheard clamor of public conversation:

The orators yap, and guns
Go off in a back street;
But the faith does not die
That in our time these things
Will amaze the literate children
In their non-sectarian schools
And the dark places be
Ablaze with love and poetry
When the power of good prevails.
What middle-class shits we are
To imagine for one second
That our privileged ideals
Are divine wisdom, and the dim
Forms that kneel at noon
In the city not ourselves.

The crackle of the communal ideal and any firings of solitary apotheosis are always quickly snuffed; Mahon refuses to kindle any willed idealism from abroad. Even if no recipient is named, Mahon's lyrics seek the approval of a decidedly Irish muse, and they also recognize the folly of that desire. For returning home only reintroduces him to the quotidian violence of “a city so changed / By five years of war / I scarcely recognize / The places I grew up in,” and it leaves the poet hounded by the damning hum (“same … bomb … home”) of a conditional tense impossible to flee:

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 learned what is meant by home.

Mahon struggles, but not too hard, to maintain some faith in human possibility. In an early poem, “Glengormley,” he opens a little hymn to human enlightenment this way, distilling his shrill sentiments hilariously:

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.

Once upon a long time ago our lives may have been grand, full of mistakes and violence and passionate intensity, but active at least. Now we have put ourselves out to pasture, dreaming greener thoughts in greener shades: “The sticks / And stones that once broke bones will not now harm / A generation of such sense and charm. // Only words hurt us now.” If poetry is to comprise something more meaningful than “semantic scruple,” the speaker of this poem comes to realize he will need to resist the impulse to dwell in the bog-worlds of Ireland's mystic past. Less appealing than their “saint and hero” ancestors, the stiff-lipped simpletons of the present moment are more real for all their ordinariness and therefore more worthy of his attention:

                                                                                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.

Their banality and their extremity are both worth investigation, even celebration, and a neighborly verse is what Mahon has been aiming for his entire career.

Like Heaney, whose poem “Digging” is among the best known Irish poems of the last century, Mahon has written a verse manifesto of Irish poetics. No Irish poet can afford to be entirely extracted from the violence of modern Ireland, certainly not if that poet hopes to maintain an audience there. The pen must fit the hand like a gun. That much is clear. An apathetic, confessional mode would not be likely to receive praise in a country where public drama is brought to a terrifying conclusion too many days of the week. But the predicament of writing beyond oneself, beyond history, and beyond the “merely” political is more difficult to resolve. To write sectarian verse is not a viable option either, though it might at least assure one a passionate reading audience.

Mahon illustrates this predicament in dramatic guise, adopting the persona of “The Last of the Fire Kings,” a kind of bewildered poet-dreamer reigning over a dilapidated kingdom. For this overseer the temptations of a simpler life, one without responsibilities to his people, are difficult to banish. He longs to be “like the man who descends / At two milk churns // With a bulging / String bag and vanishes / Where the lane turns.” Or he would like to maintain the incognito of a foreign wanderer, slinking about like one “Who drops at night / From a moving train // And strikes out over the fields / Where fireflies glow, // Not knowing a word of the language.” For “five years,” he confesses, he has been sipping his delectable teas like some Hoon,

Perfecting my cold dream
Of a palace out of time,
A palace of porcelain
Where the frugivorous
Inheritors recline
In their rich fabrics
Far from the sea.

Now, however, the poet as king cannot drift into frowsty realms of grand imagining, for “the fire-loving / People, rightly perhaps, / Will not countenance this.” Barring a radical change in profession, his resolution is to release himself from such romances and to enact a policy shift that will meet the demands of the masses. He will inhabit, he decides, their “world of / Sirens, bin-lids / And bricked up windows,” but rather than adopt their “fire-loving” ways, he will turn that fire on himself and move forward to embrace a different oblivion:

Either way, I am
Through with history—
Who lives by the sword
Dies by the sword.
Last of the fire kings, I shall
Break with tradition and
Die by my own hand
Rather than perpetuate
The barbarous cycle.

Neither escape nor self-incrimination, his break is nothing less than a revision of poetic calling. Rather than live a self-induced exile in some elsewhere of the mind or an actual elsewhere (London or New York), his resolution is to abandon himself to the present, to thrust himself into the mass of men, a denizen but not a sacrificial lamb: “Not to release them / From the ancient curse / But to die their creature and be thankful.” Mahon's poet is no Emersonian “stander above men”; he is not even a representative man, unless by virtue of his occasionally petty and comic concerns. The vocation of the poet, for Derek Mahon, must be accompanied by a committed humility and the freedom to feel, as he puts it in “Spring in Belfast,” “the perverse pride in being on the side / Of the fallen angels and refusing to get up.”

Nearly a third of Mahon's Collected Poems is dominated by The Hudson Letter and The Yellow Book, two book-length poems published in the 1990s. These sequences abound with similar calisthenics of self-scrutiny, though both poems are constructed as public conversations, the first an epistle and the other a discursive document named after the fin de siècle magazine associated with Wilde and “the decadents.” Here at another century's end, the poet broods like a winsome solitary, a holdout from the past, a relic without any fancy reliquary to call home. That posture of dejection is managed with understatement, humor, and whispered wit in the earlier lyrics. And to be fair, in their strongest sections these poems represent the culmination of the manner commonly thought of as Mahon's: “terminal ironies” bespeak what in the opening section of the first of these poems is called “the resilience of our lyric appetite.” But the entrées offered are much too rich: forced exclamations abound, affectation intervenes, and the very grandiloquence rejected in “Rage for Order” is now a butter slathered on the sourdough of mockery.

The thinner of these two poems, The Hudson Letter, is addressed in eighteen sections to an imagined Irish muse from the poet's “rented ‘studio’ apartment in New York / five blocks from the river.” This urban Halcyon grants him “time to think and work, / long-suffering friends and visitors, the bars / where Dylan Thomas spent his final hours, / God rest him,” but “there's something missing / in this autistic slammer.” Hart Crane looms large above the bridges of The Hudson Letter, but the gulls that gander at our speeding American trains are imported like the author. Mahon recognizes an “Inca tern and Andean gull, who / fled their storm-wrecked cage in the Bronx Zoo” only to stare “at the alien corn of Radio City, Broadway and Times Square.” “Obviously I don't mean / to pen yet one more craven European / paean to the States,” Mahon blurts, but the unreality of America is vibrant subject matter for a foreigner. Sparing with rhyme and playful with meter, Mahon masters a swinging elegance in this sequence, distilling to song several particular archetypes: “Around five a hand, with Gershwin nonchalance, / shook up the empties in the recycling bin / at the corner, shivering for a drop of gin.” Or in one fine persona poem, spoken circa 1895 by an immigrant daughter to her mother back home, slant rhymes mute the exclamatory bewilderment of an Irish Ruth:

I get each Sunday off and use the privilege
To explore Broadway, the new Brooklyn Bridge
Or the Statue of Liberty, copper torch on top
Which, wd. You believe it, actually lights up,
And look at the Jersey shoreline, blue and gold:
It's all fire and sunlight here in the New World.
Eagles and bugles! Curious their simple faith
That stars and stripes are all of life and death—
As if Earth's centre lay in Central Park
When we both know it runs thro' Co. Cork.

Other personalities crowd these pages: most successfully, the homage to “Auden, floppy-slippered bear of St. Mark's Place,” whose “cheesy limestone face” is seen through a “dirty window, gin in paw, / on a hot evening during the great Cold War.” That elder would appreciate the impossible rhymes that frame the inquiries put to him: “what would you make now of the cosmic pax / Americana, our world of internet and fax. … ?”

Besprinkled as these sections are with the rubbish of today's cities—bumper stickers, overheard speech, television flash, and Hollywood icons—The Hudson Letter will please those with a penchant for the “post-modern;” that said, one cannot imagine Mahon desiring that species of admiration. The style is one of conglomeration, addition, and pop; the mire of the moment is inescapable, despite the fairly traditional hexameters. And Mahon's transition to a new New York poetics is openly recognized: “I go night shopping like Frank O'Hara I go bopping / up Bleeker for juice, croissants, Perrier, ice-cream / and Gitane filters, pick up the laundry, get back / to five (5!) messages on the answering machine / from Mary K. and Eliza, Louis, Barry and Jack, / and on TV sixty channels of mind-polluting dreck.” This is a Mahon giddy with consumer angst, one willing to record the minutiae of quotidian bother. It is true, the artist is not completely abandoned:

Sometimes, as I sit in the pub or stand up there
In Columbia University like Philby in Red Square,
I blush like a traitor; but what kind of traitor?
A traitor to the past? To a country not our own?
To the land of fiscal rectitude and spiritual desolation?
The ‘family values’ brigade? The conservative task force?
The gene militia? The armies of the unborn?

Such glimpses into the poet's psyche come at too high a price: slackened verse, the noise of trite interrogation, and the reader's yawn. Elsewhere the reader may even smirk, as when Mahon turns Larkin-wry (“Now that we all get laid and everyone swings, / who needs the formal continence of l'amour / courtois and the hang-ups of a provincial clique”) or stoops to redramatize scenes from King Kong. Yet for all its playful accessibility and good humor, facts which make for quick digestion and a giggle or two, the sequence does little to beg rereading.

The Yellow Book too is unevenly satisfying. The poet seems caught between imitating the contributors to the old magazine from which he has taken his title and maintaining his own late-century swagger. The brief italicized prologue opens in the guise of translation but never gets off the ground:

Chastely to write these eclogues I need to lie
like the astrologers, in an attic next the sky
where, high among church spires, I can dream and hear
their grave-hymns wind-blown to my ivory tower.
I can see workshops full of noise and talk,
cranes and masts of the ocean-going city,
vast cloud-pack photographs of eternity.

This is stilted, overpasteurized verse. The extraneous first adverb, the archaic “next the sky,” and the vague modifications (what would “cloud-pack” be exactly?), are made all the more affected by the most cacophonous couplets in Mahon's oeuvre.

As easy as it is to display such unsightly gaffes and to argue that The Yellow Book fails to gel because of them, this project is hefty and much ore is nestled within the dross. Particularly charming is the Virgil who revisits the poem intermittently: a poetry addict who has banished booze to assemble himself anew each day, “whoring after the sublime” against his better judgment. “Once,” Mahon similarly reminds himself, “you would wake up shaking at this hour / but now, this morning, you are a child once more / wide-eyed in an attic room,” its window under “the shining slates / where children slept in the days of Wilde and Yeats.” That curmudgeonly self-deprecator participates in his own Q & A in “Hangover Square,” musing, “Today is the first day for the rest of your life? / —tell that to your liver; tell that to your ex-wife” and sings one of the greatest love poems to tobacco ever written in “Smoke”:

                                                                                                                                  Sold
On sobriety, I turn to the idea of nicotine,
My opium, hashish, morphine and cocaine,
“Turkish on the left, Virginia on the right,”
my cigarette a lighthouse in the night.
Autumn in Dublin; safe home from New York
I climb as directed to our proper dark,
Five flights without a lift up to the old
Gloom we used to love, and the old cold.
Head in the clouds but tired of verse, I fold
Away my wind-harp and my dejection odes
And mute the volume on the familiar phone
(“… leave your number; speak after the tone”)
to concentrate on pipe-dreams and smoke-clouds.

Like a crazed curator for a museum of urban detritus, Mahon proves a speed demon of a list-maker in his cataloging of things “At the Chelsea Arts Club,” where he comes to the conclusion that “Everywhere aspires to the condition of pop music, / The white noise of late-century consumerism— / Besieged by Shit, Sperm, Garbage, Gristle, Scum / And other raucous trivia.” After an avalanche of commas and sordid accoutrements, the maniac finally manages to confess:

Maybe I'm finally turning into an old fart,
but I do prefer the traditional kinds of art,
respect for materials, draughtsmanship and so on—
though I'm in two minds about Tank Girl over there,
the Muse in chains, a screw-bolt in one ear,
the knickers worn over the biking gear.

Like those who pursued art for its own sake before him, Mahon is willing to keep alight “the cold candle of decadence” and to expose “the delights of modern life,” a.k.a. “The Idiocy of Human Aspiration,” as he titles his rendering of Juvenal's tenth satire.

In light of these late sequences, it would be easy to paint Mahon as an urban poet, as a fairly miserable late-century apartment-dweller laboring at verse among bedraggled pigeons and bag ladies; he is certainly less prone than comrade Heaney to evoke the milk-churning, blackberry-plucking Eden of an Irish boyhood. Yet Mahon's strongest poems are the locale-driven lyrics of his middle period, where his craftsmanship is brought to bear on the crumbling and eroded landscapes that bespeak Ireland's essential island solitude, places where the poet can hear his ancestry murmuring. Mahon is a poet of used-up melancholy spaces. His midcareer lyrics inhabit border regions—the edges of fields, the bisecting fringes of coast and surf, the barbed wire boundary of the junkyard—and are devoid of the social banter and affected neon so prevalent in Mahon's later books. Again we might be tempted to call this mode Wordsworthian, but the poet's “seed time” is rarely an issue, and the poems are not recollected in tranquillity as often as they are involved in the active pursuit of capturing time and refusing it further motion. These are stilled lives. In Mahon's expert hands, the lyric can function like a funeral urn; epitaphic and nostalgic, the poet's own nostos, his returning pain, is sifted into the inclusive dust of his perishable country and its collective memory.

“A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford,” Mahon's most widely anthologized poem, opens with such motion that the reader is moved, in the space of one stanza, from the “now” of the modern moment, through “Peruvian mines” and “Indian compounds,” to “a disused shed in Co. Wexford, / Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel” where a “thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.” Hidden from thought and view, trapped outside history in the dank shadows, what should the mushrooms “do there but desire? / So many days beyond the rhododendrons / With the world waltzing in its bowl of clowd, / They have learnt patience and silence,” awaiting an “expropriated mycologist” who “never came back.” Voices of suffering and dread, these beings hymn a chorus of forgetfulness. With a casual turn of his ragged blank verse, Mahon blurs the poem's perspective to reveal a moment seen from inside the gilled caps, the mushy little craniums, of these sentient toadstools:

There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking
Into the earth that nourished it;
And nightmares, born of these and the grim
Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
Those nearest the door grow strong—
“Elbow room! Elbow room!”
The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken pitchers, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.
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 drought
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 feverished forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

The violent intrusion of the we registers more dramatically after such deep identification with the torpor of shroom and gloom; we are tourists, armed with cameras, among the primeval citizens of decay, and we think of ourselves, like them, crying for elbow room in a world of nightmares. If the reader catches a whiff of allegory in these stanzas, it is because Mahon figures his subjects so grandly that, in the final stanza, they become the mythical corpses of a past that demands recognition:

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.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naïve labours have been in vain!”

Those who have worked so hard at staying alive deserve more than a last word from the graveyard, and those who live have a responsibility not to turn their backs. In a lesser poet, these might register as platitudes, but the sweep of continental breadth with which the poem opens is so carefully focused by that camera obscura, that we do not resist the evocation of European disaster. Such a gathering of poetic force constitutes much more than naïve labor. The poem's conclusion arrives, as Frost says it must, riding on its own melting “like a piece of ice on a hot stove.”

Mahon corrals a similar sense of inevitability in the austere twelve lines of “Everything Is Going to Be Alright,” a lyric held together with the fragile glue of a few “ands” and “buts”:

How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The lines flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be alright.

The poem opens with seven convoluted monosyllables, awkward and ungainly, the poet tripping over his own desire to will the poem's title—a statement of belief—into being. Then the cumbersome word contemplate blares its consonants like a stop sign. Given such a rhetorical ramp, it is hard to know if a real question is revving its engines. The opening lines frame an ambiguous proposal—is it not “alright” for a poet to long for glad contemplation, for the mind to clear and fill again like the reflected landscape? Is it wrong to hope for collected tranquility under the circumstances? In either case, the facts pronounced next must be recorded. The somber refrain “There will be dying” arrives “unbidden” from the “watchful heart.” But from that “hidden source” pumps music that the speaker, trying to maintain a more superficial observation, wants to sing over. Two competing choirs, contrapuntal mediums of desire, are present, suspending the poem between funeral and reverie. The entire poem is quietly tugged by such paradoxical extremes. Though the “sun rises in spite of everything,” even that, by the poem's end, becomes caught in this balancing act, so the sunlight is a “riot” and the day threatens to “break.” But what is breaking here is nothing less than the poet's barely maintained optimism. It is almost impossible to believe that last line, though a reader wants to believe it, and the force of rhyme (“bright … sunlight … right”) is on his side. The poem is not overtly impressive; its tact is so softly mannered, we might mistake it for something drab in the midst of Mahon's usually baroque textures.

Mahon is frequently lauded as an Apollonian versifier, but a poem like “Everything Is Going to Be Alright” proves that he is equally comfortable without golden wings. This same versatility is evident in the beautifully modulated free verse of “The Mayo Tao,” a poem thick enough with agrarian assertions to read like a lost Irish chapter of Walden. “I have abandoned the dream kitchens for a low fire / and a prescriptive literature of the spirit,” the poem begins: “The nearest shop is four miles away.” We are not told what the speaker has escaped from, but we find him in the midst of retreat to a landscape teeming with facts and odd society:

My days are spent in conversation
with deer and blackbirds;
At night fox and badger gather at my door.
I have stood for hours
watching a salmon doze in the tea-gold dark,
for months listening to the sob story
of a stone in the road, the best,
most monotonous sob story I have ever heard.

Measured in increments of attention, recuperation of the muse follows nothing less than a blossoming of the senses. Overawed with doubt at every turn, this poet of terminal ironies comes closer than ever to a confession of faith:

I am an expert on frost crystals
and the silence of crickets, a confidant
of the stinking shore, the stars in the mud—
there is an immanence in these things
which drives me, despite my scepticism,
almost to the point of speech,
like sunlight cleaving the lake mist in morning
or when tepid water
runs cold from the tap.

Such quiet evocations are made quieter still by the inclusion of that perfectly placed almost. What other word would be so perfect to follow “scepticism” in this context? Even the somewhat overdetermined image of light and water begs a gesture of self-correction; yet the alternative final image—a common faucet—expands like a rebuttal to Coleridge's famous lines from “Dejection: An Ode”: “I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.” For this poet, at least for one moment, the outward forms are plenty to set the fountains running again.

A lesser poet might end with that slight crescendo, but Mahon is not content until the speaker has been restored to his proper pianissimo:

I have been working for years
On a four-line poem
About the life of a leaf;
I think it might come out right this winter.

The working life demands such homage and self-deprecation, the willingness to condition certain certainties with a barely hopeful “I think” and the desire to push the pen ahead nevertheless. The rest of us would be lucky to know such labor.