Derek Mahon, Washing Up (Gallery Press)
The Gallery Press scrupulously date the publication of this book as 29 October 2020. Derek Mahon would have been 79 on November 23 but very sadly died on October 1. So it was unexpectedly posthumous although, knowing how it takes months if not longer for books to go through the presses, it might not have been his very last work.
As with his other most recent collections, its title offers a number of meanings. Red Sails might have suggested a sunset, Against the Clock time running out and now Washing Up not only includes the domestic chore of the title poem and coming to rest somewhere but also a final summary. While Mahon has been aware of his advancing years for some time, though, there is no let up in his output in this generous volume or in his commitment.
In The Old Place, addressed to a younger generation - maybe grandchildren- he looks back at himself
at peace here in a world ill-at-ease
with itself,
for 'readers who saw the point of the exercise'. That is disarmingly self-effacing for a poet who took a place among the first rank of his generation for those of us who certainly did see the point. But in Around the Town and Among the Rocks which are companion pieces about local eccentric figures in Kinsale he identifies his outsider role with theirs, aware that poetry is not currently central to the concerns of most.
Mahon is hardly becalmed but has found a deeper equanimity, maintaining his complaint against global capitalism, profit for profit's sake, its human and environmental cost but, not quite resigned to its inevitability, holds on to some vestigial hope.
He is as clear and well set out in these poems as ever, if not more so, his rhyme schemes seeming to add to the clarity as if the arriving rhyme affirms the thought. One might suspect a few words to have been the 'best available' and not quite natural, which is often a problem for such verse but in An Old Theme, he hopes that his inevitable passing will come 'in an armchair at the twilight hour' reading something like,
Schopenhauer
(the bit where he says nature doesn't care
about individuals, only about the species).
'Species' in line 8 of the stanza rhymes with 'please' in line 2 and arrives so opportunely that one feels like getting up to applaud. But I think I know how he does that because I've done it myself. You go back and put the slightly extraneous 'please' in afterwards, not before, but it's a good trick that works.
It is measured more than world-weary but there is a downbeat acceptance about much of it. In the ironic view of the dystopia, in Atlantis, being created by a culture of robots and cruise ships in which,
no trace
survives of anything not in the future tense
...
It will be fabulous and will cost the earth.
While personally preferring poetry to succeed, or fail, on its own terms and not liking templates, advice or recipes for how to do it, Art Poétique, a version from Verlaine, is entirely sound, as it were, as is the attitude in Another Cold Spring that,
'This slight
outpouring isn't meant
for your enlightenment
but for my own delight;
still, if it tastes right,
take of it what you want.'
and although poetry is not at its best when being about poetry, that seems to me to be an attitude one relaxes into with age when impressing editors, publishers or even readers has become more obviously not the point.
As well as Verlaine, Mahon continued with his interpretations of poems in other languages, like some Chinese and Neruda and he either finds in them or chose them for a timelessness that, one hopes, goes beyond the more pressing concerns we hope to put behind us eventually.
In Quarantine, one of the better plague poems we are likely to see as well as A Fox in Grafton St.,
An ambulance
goes wailing up the road as a stoic
shopper emerges into the eerie silence.
It is a rich and rewarding experience to sit with these poems, all of them, as is customarily the case with Mahon. I spent more time with this book than I usually do before knocking out some thoughts on it, not because I needed to but because it was so enjoyable. There is a feeling about it for some of us who might be 'of a certain age' that we won't be seeing the likes of Derek Mahon again in the same way that Norman MacCaig is gone for good, too, but that is tacitly acknowledged in the poems. Mahon could be compared and contrasted with Seamus Heaney to the detriment of neither. They both contributed to putting England in the shade more than it is used to in recent decades. But if Heaney had his own exquisite music that proved beyond imitators, as if, like Thelonoius Monk, he'd done it to prevent them, Mahon was as significant and, in Sean O'Brien's words in his Guardian obituary,
Younger poets admired Heaney and Longley, but Mahon was perhaps the more frequent model.
As it says somewhere below, I can't see Sean or August Kleinzahler being too much put out if I make this the Best Collection of the Year, not only in the circumstances but with good reason, in what was in the end a very competitive year with three of my very favourite poets publishing new work. The Complete Mahon, when it happens, despite most of it being on the shelf over there, will be nothing less than essential.
