Top 6 - Derek Mahon

If Seamus Heaney hadn't been such a vast figure in British Poetry for the last thirty years then one might imagine that more attention might have fallen on the likes of Derek Mahon, who, at his best, has produced equally fine poems, doesn't seem to publish a bad one and is more prepared to make a politically-committed statement.

On the other hand, despite having his books since the Selected Poems published in 1990, all of my selections here come from that book whereas, when I get around to picking from Heaney, I expect there'll be much more recent poems highlighted.

Courtyards in Delft is one of those poems you just want to imitate, for any part of it to seep into your own poems, to steal from, to be 'influenced by', to echo in ways that nobody will quite know where you got it from. Although it might look like yet another poem based on paintings, it's better than that. If any poet ever tried to edit out adjectives from poetry then they need to see how such well-chosen ones can do so much.

Always keen on a villanelle that genuinely works, I'm almost equally mad about The Dawn Chorus. It is a deep thing apparently summoned up from the sub-conscious but immaculately well constructed in verse, too.

A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford is the anthology piece and understandably so, as good a political poem as there ever was. Afterlives similarly doesn't pull punches although it is enormously disappointing that we are described as 'middle class twits' in the edition I have rather than the word he originally used which was more vernacular but powerful because he's usually so erudite.

Old Roscoff is a tough, muscular description of place but it gets inside the history of the place and is far too sympathetic to be macho swagger. And In Carrowdore Churchyard is that thing I always like if and when done well enough, homage to the admired precursor, in this case Louis Macneice.

The later poems are by no means forgettable but they don't seem to have the same power as these pieces. He doesn't have the same equanimity as Heaney and might now be meditating more inwardly, in a more melancholy state of mind but he was masterful at the height of his powers and doesn't owe us anything.