It is especially good to have Mahon's carefully edited 'selected collected' [Poems: 1962–1978]. It may be a little dismaying to find a poet under 40 devoting more time to tidying the drawers of his wardrobe than to adding new garments to it, but Mahon warns us that he may revise his poems still further, in the Auden manner. Mentioning Auden acts as a reminder that he and MacNeice issued their 'Collecteds' before their fortieth birthdays, and that precocious writers may have considerable achievements to their credit while still young. Mahon certainly has, and the fastidiousness which keeps his collection short also ensures that each poem is a properly accomplished work of art.

Mahon is not a characteristic Ulster poet: his version of lapidary is closer to Robert Graves's than to Yeats's. Yet childhood and adolescence in Ulster have left their mark on him—in poem after poem, he traces his wariness and refusal to be betrayed into easy afflatus to Irish distortions of reality.

Much of his work is pervaded by a sense of exile, and remembering the past becomes for him a matter of emblems and symbols. He is attracted to artists who have the power to make things from their various losses…. Mahon is a practitioner of the carefully stylised poem-as-letter, usually to Ireland from Europe or vice versa. 'Beyond Howth Head' shows him tooling up for his own 'New Year Letter,'… but there is more awareness of unease, of being farther into a dangerous century, than there is in Auden.