The first poem in Derek Mahon's Lives is about arriving home in Dublin, distraught, after a Transatlantic flight: and something like the time- and place-confusion of jet-travellers gives the book its theme. The poems, written from that Atlantic island whose aerials are turned towards Britain and America, are about wanting to locate oneself, to decide to what parts of the human inheritance to direct one's aerial. Are signals still to be received from Raftery, the saints or Stone Age man? Or does the poet, like the anthropologist,

                    know too much
                    To be anything any more?

A beautiful poem, 'In the Aran Islands', turns, in construction as well as in thought, on this axis. Witnessing a pub-singer, one of his hands 'earthed to his girl', the other cupping his ear to hear his own song, the poet sees it as what he longs for himself—to be doubly located, in the here and now and elsewhere…. It is a reassuring vision, cancelled simultaneously by a less comfortable one: a solitary seagull, going out like the song into the Atlantic night, reminds him of the wildness he must always lack. There is tact and precision in Mahon's rendering of such turning of his thoughts upon themselves, such tentative trying-on of different lives (the 'lives' of his title). There are, as well, fine intellectual high-jinks in the long verse letter 'Beyond Howth Head'—'Dover Beach' done over by Auden—in which he reviews his theme more discursively. This is a sparse and not very ambitious collection, but the work of a sure talent. (p. 375)