Since the mid-1960s, several Northern Irish poets have made their presence felt in the English literary world. The most praised, Seamus Heaney, has been hailed by some critics as a major poet—the most important since William Butler Yeats. There is now a growing interest in his work in America. Like Heaney, Derek Mahon has established himself in England as a considerable talent. His three volumes of poems have now been gathered into Poems 1962–1978, which will serve as a good introduction to his work for American readers.

There they will find a poetry that is poised, scrupulous and reserved. Irony is generally on hand to prevent escape into confessional self-indulgence. Like all good Irish poets, he does not fear artifice, nor does he eschew the offhand, conversational tone. He is very much a poet of light and form, at times pursuing a definition of Stephen Dedalus's "Ineluctable modality of the visible," as in the series "Light Music."… (p. 260)

Technically, Mahon's work is varied. He handles the long line with dexterity, as he does the octosyllabic couplet; he can rhyme unobtrusively, without jarring syntax, and can produce the sorts of matter-of-fact prosy poems more in keeping with contemporary taste. His early mentor was Louis MacNeice—like Mahon, a Belfast-born Protestant. Though his occasional flights of flamboyant rhetoric are generally more successful than MacNeice's, Mahon shares his honest skepticism; both, when at their best, also share the urge to pay homage to the object as it is, to refine perception of the thing down to an ingenuous clarity.

In spite of his background, Mahon has little to say about the position of the poet amid Northern Ireland's troubles, except the occasional ironic comment…. His restraint of the issue is as refreshing as the lack of it in so many other Irish poets is nauseating.

Part of the reason that Mahon is not better known here is that he belongs to an Irish literary tradition not much appreciated in America—or England, for that matter. It is an urban tradition, as indubitably Irish as James Joyce or Samuel Beckett or Sean O'Casey. It shares the prevailing moods of Irish poetry—bitterness, melancholy, tenderness; but it has a powerful ironic edge to it and a searing objectivity. Its esthetic and ontological complexities do not fit in with the rural/pastoral stereotype of the Irish poet dear to certain cultural circles—a stereotype that would lead, say, to a preference for Heaney's work. It is to be hoped that Mahon's poetry will introduce that other—urban—tradition of Irish writing to new readers, who will find it a challenging and sometimes radical one. (pp. 260-61)