Derek Mahon, Against the Clock (Gallery Press)Being the title of the book and the first poem in it, Derek Mahon's idea that, now 77, he is wrriting 'against the clock', is as explicit as it can be made. He is aware of a 'final deadline', admires Sophocles for still writing at 90, the banished Ovid, and a litany of 'exiles' and 'reprobates', knows all too well the doubt in
moments when you think
contemporary paper games too daft for you
but resolves to press on, humbly for someone of his esteemed reputation, in spite of his misgivings.
He need hardly worry. In spite of a widespread tide of opinion, among anyone concerned enough to hold any opinion on the subject, that contemporary poetry does itself no favours and my own truism that many poets falter after the age of 60, it doesn't apply to him.
A truism is something truish but robustly unverifiable and thus not 'true' at all. Some might say that even Seamus Heaney began to revisit earlier themes in his later books and that after 40 years or more of invention, anybody might begin to flag. 58 might be a good age for some of us to have at least taken a break, given it some thought, and wonder if it's worth doing any more.
Beginning Against the Clock at the beginning and proceeding page by page, a radical habit I've adopted with poetry books only recently, one is convinced that Derek Mahon hasn't written a bad poem in his life but it's possible he's conceding more than he might to his various rhyme schemes in 5 or 6 line stanzas and not doing a great deal more than being Derek Mahon.
That is a fine enough thing on its own but the Gallery Press have gone to the loving lengths of packaging the paperback in a quality jiffy bag and, inside that, carefully wrapped it in brown paper, too. Books need to deserve such reverence.
It can often be that one poem sets a book alight after which all the others look better and those one had read already improve for being illuminated by light from the other.
Stardust begins with a not unfamilar idea of the light from burnt-out stars only now arriving for us to see.
These were the crucible
before we came in cinders and flying rubble
to this raw shore, to crawl on its warm sands
inventing hope.
It is a brilliant poem, bringing together the awestruck wonder of our relationship with the universe and our perceived paltry investment in it, discomfited by the climate change, error and mismanagement, implying the loss of what might have been something more like paradise.
Derek Mahon's always been too wise to believe that any such thing was really possible and always had his political complaints and edge but here he presents it on the vastest possible scale, and to great effect.
We are failed and insubstantial and, seen from the opposite perspective, from the microscopically small rather than the infinitely enormous, in Thing Theory,
What of atoms? Do they blink
like fish in an aquarium tank
and look out at us looking in
and what they can't help but notice is a wasteful and trivial culture.
If Ms. Duffy's Sincerity included a concerted and verifiably entirely accurate list of epithets applicable to the current President of the United States of America, Mahon provides three sonnets, in Trump Time, that are equally apposite and might be thought to be more considered but, what can you do. You either write poems or you don't.
Without immediately re-reading Mahon's books of the last decade or more, I suspect this is the sort of 'return to form' artists can sometimes be praised for that is somehow ahead of a few of its immediate predecessors when there should be no implication that there had been anything like a significant dip in form in the meantime. But rather than provide an unconditional eulogy for a poet whose books I'll always buy, and I'm not quite sure why I'm a couple of months late finding out about this one,
I might ask if the lines in Rising Late,
Best skies at first light, but I don't do dawn
no more. The enchantment has already gone
really wanted to be
The best skies are at first light, but I don't do dawn
anymore. The enchantment has already gone
but metrical/syllabic constraints have needs must compacted it. It isn't quite right, for me, and so one of Derek Mahon, his editor or me have a minor bit of explaining to do.
But, otherwise, this is a wonderful book from one of the stalwarts of that generation of fine Irish poets that made 'English' poetry, which might have been becoming too 'English' in places, less 'English', for which we remain very grateful.
It is crucial how a book is ordered, its organisation being able to take us from one place to another irrespective of the chronology of when the poems were written, which can be an idea but can be a bad one.
Perhaps we are building towards something as poems about place, or domesticity, gather in the last few pages before ending on Woodpigeons at the Grove, giving voice to them,
the serere ones, dopey and content
to roost on the cool edge of a continent
that, having ruminated to nearly two pages in length, beyond the sometimes alarming facility of poems to fit on one page in suspiciously designer fashion, ends,
we're prosaic
creatures, neither heroic nor archaic
but worldly, self-confined to safety zones,
still dreaming of our once infinite horizons.
And that'll do, that'll do fine, not only as poetry but as a manifesto in a world that might have gone beyond its limits and not all of us can, or want to, see what happens next. Possibly not even in poetry.