Derek Mahon, Life on Earth (The Gallery Press)
Poets from Northern Ireland dominated poetry in Britain in the late twentieth century to such an extent that they have almost obscured each other’s reputations. The vast popularity and achievement of Seamus Heaney has made Michael Longley and Derek Mahon seem more minor figures than they otherwise might have but that shouldn’t be allowed to undermine their status.
Mahon was always a darker and harder-edged poet than Heaney but both have been concerned with echoes from the past. Both return regularly to Ancient Greek and Roman poets to re-work passages and in the same way that Heaney revisited his early subterranean themes in District and Circle, Mahon is often to be found looking back too. Having famously described a Disused Shed, the Delft of Pietr de Hooch and even the primeval sub-conscious of the Dawn Chorus, Mahon’s later work is pre-occupied with time.
His characteristic discomfiture that was once a political dissatisfaction is more often now that of an older man in a newer world. His lines are considered, slow-moving and packed with an erudition that one supposes this world finds little time for. In Savannah Dock, he asks,
May life be gentle in your scented air
and the art flourish that you nourish there
in peace and quiet, far from the marketplace.
Such idylls contrast with the situation of the impressive opening poem here, Ariadne on Naxos, adapted from Ovid’s Heroides in which the abandoned Ariadne contemplates her compromised existence at the mercy of barren nature and predatory animals.
But Mahon’s title is taken from a set of poems with wider, environmental concerns, celebrating Gaia and asking, of the Sun,
We can never die
while you are roaring there
in serial rebirth
far from our atmosphere.
Remember life on Earth!
He is perhaps more equable in this volume than he has ever been, his measured rhythms more comfortable here than some of his younger, more rebarbative poetry. At his best he is masterly and these poems are less discursive than the more rambling meditations of The Yellow Book. Having been born into a golden generation is not always such a blessing but it was in no small part due to Derek Mahon’s contribution that the Irish poets of his time were so highly regarded as a group.
Poets from Northern Ireland dominated poetry in Britain in the late twentieth century to such an extent that they have almost obscured each other’s reputations. The vast popularity and achievement of Seamus Heaney has made Michael Longley and Derek Mahon seem more minor figures than they otherwise might have but that shouldn’t be allowed to undermine their status.
Mahon was always a darker and harder-edged poet than Heaney but both have been concerned with echoes from the past. Both return regularly to Ancient Greek and Roman poets to re-work passages and in the same way that Heaney revisited his early subterranean themes in District and Circle, Mahon is often to be found looking back too. Having famously described a Disused Shed, the Delft of Pietr de Hooch and even the primeval sub-conscious of the Dawn Chorus, Mahon’s later work is pre-occupied with time.
His characteristic discomfiture that was once a political dissatisfaction is more often now that of an older man in a newer world. His lines are considered, slow-moving and packed with an erudition that one supposes this world finds little time for. In Savannah Dock, he asks,
May life be gentle in your scented air
and the art flourish that you nourish there
in peace and quiet, far from the marketplace.
Such idylls contrast with the situation of the impressive opening poem here, Ariadne on Naxos, adapted from Ovid’s Heroides in which the abandoned Ariadne contemplates her compromised existence at the mercy of barren nature and predatory animals.
But Mahon’s title is taken from a set of poems with wider, environmental concerns, celebrating Gaia and asking, of the Sun,
We can never die
while you are roaring there
in serial rebirth
far from our atmosphere.
Remember life on Earth!
He is perhaps more equable in this volume than he has ever been, his measured rhythms more comfortable here than some of his younger, more rebarbative poetry. At his best he is masterly and these poems are less discursive than the more rambling meditations of The Yellow Book. Having been born into a golden generation is not always such a blessing but it was in no small part due to Derek Mahon’s contribution that the Irish poets of his time were so highly regarded as a group.
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