In a verse letter by Michael Longley, a fellow Ulsterman, Derek Mahon is addressed approvingly as one of the "poetic conservatives". He might well take umbrage; for the spirit that emerges from his poems is one which, while it hungers for ceremony and inherited order, has only the wannest faith that ceremony survives or that such order has relevance. Wistful, reticent, resigned, the poems in The Snow Party sound like the fastidious reflections of self-imposed exile….

Lost futures, rather than Mr [Seamus] Heaney's lost pasts, are the substance of Mr Mahon's poems. "The Last of the Fire Kings", "Thammuz", "The Banished Gods" and (a beautifully judged stroke of minimalism) "Flying" are all hesitant reachings forward to possibilities just beyond the range of understanding. In these, and in other poems such as "The Snow Party" and in parts of the "Cavafy" sequence, there is a sardonic aestheticism, a diffident acknowledgment that art can arrest and fix at least something in what would otherwise be mere noise and flux. Two prose-poems, "A Hermit" and "The Apotheosis of Tins", play humorous variations on the theme….

For all its circumstantial wryness, this is tenuous stuff, however, and it seems to me, reading The Snow party, Mr Mahon's third book, that there is some danger of his talent thinning itself away into arbitrariness and whimsy. As if to show that he can indeed manage something more solid, he ends the collection with its most impressive poem, a meditation with the bleak title "A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford". Here "A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole", and are celebrated as dumb survivors whose tenacity spells out a hard-won lesson….

[With] Mr Mahon one senses a pressure of events behind the taut evasiveness….