With three published volumes of poetry behind him—Night-Crossing (1968), Lives (1972), The Snow Party (1975)—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….

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…. (p. 23)

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. (p. 24)

[The] 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…. (pp. 24-5)

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)…. 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)…. (p. 25)

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. (p. 26)

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. 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…. (pp. 26-7)

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…. 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. (p. 27)

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…. 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. (p. 29)

[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'…. '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…. (pp. 31-2)

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…. Most critics, even those who see Mahon's poetry as 'tenuous stuff', the result of a talent 'thinning itself away into arbitrariness and whimsy' [see excerpt above by Anthony Thwaite] 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' [see excerpt above by Douglas Dunn]. 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. (p. 34)