Derek Mahon

Derek Mahon, who died yesterday, was one of those rare poets whose books you could open at any page safe in the knowledge that you would find a good poem. Norman MacCaig was another one. Something about his writing meant there were no bad ones.

He was an important part of an outstanding generation of poets from Northern Ireland who provided more than their fair share of the best poetry being written in Britain, from Seamus Heaney through to Paul Muldoon.

His poems were unsentimental but lyrical, set in dark times but always cognisant of potential reasons for optimism. His Selected Poems opens with a meditation on the burial place of Louis MacNeice, of who he wrote,

All we may ask of you we have;

which we may now use of Mahon himself.

His best known poem was probably A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford with its powerful evocation of mushrooms being kept in the dark and there was a strong political theme to be read into much of his poetry that was not usually explicitly about politics. 

Courtyards in Delft, The Dawn Chorus, the early poem, Morning, which was one of Four Walks in the Country near Saint-Breiuc, and Old Roscoff are just a few of many highlights from his work I was reminded of this afternoon in going back to them. But he had continued publishing books regularly with the Gallery Press until not very long ago, all maintaining his rigorous standards, sometimes more discursively, and sustaining his interest in versions of poetry from other languages. 

This seems to me like a more than usually significant loss with a major figure and particular favourite of mine reducing further the number of living poets whose new books I look out for, whose example one could admire without consciously imitating but finding, like his later decision not to do public poetry readings, one was following it anyway.

 

Awaiting still our metamorphosis,

We hoard the fragments of what once we knew.

It is not sleep itself but dreams we miss.

We yearn for that reality in this.