The Poetry of Derek Mahon by Hugh Haughton

Author:Hugh Haughton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

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Mahon’s most sustained engagement with Camusian exile occurs in the final poems of the two collections, ‘The Globe in North Carolina’ and ‘Death and the Sun’. Both are reprinted in Collected Poems in drastically abbreviated form, with ‘The Globe’ reduced from eighty-eight lines to fifty-six (CP 141) and ‘Death and the Sun’ reduced from seventy lines to one 10-line stanza entitled ‘Camus in Ulster’ (CP 99). As usual, Mahon’s revisions constitute another form of historical metamorphosis, involving loss as well as gain, and in this concluding section I will discuss both the longer original versions and the condensations of these crucial poems.

Before doing so, I want to reflect briefly on their context. ‘The Globe’ was written during a summer stint as writer-in-residence in Carolina in 1980, while ‘Death and the Sun’ should be set beside a handful of poems set in the South of Ireland where Mahon moved in 1985, first as writer-in-residence at Trinity College, Dublin, and then living in Kinsale, County Cork, working as journalist and translator. The poem ‘Kinsale’ (CP 167), with its view of ‘our yachts tinkling and dancing in the bay | like racehorses’, is about a rare moment of reprieve, but the other poems are shot through with the sense of exile which is integral to Mahon’s work at this time.

‘Achill’ (CP 156), the result of a reading at an Irish language summer school, is one of Mahon’s rare poems about the West. It originally had an epigraph in Irish, ‘im chaonaí uaigneach nach mór go bhfeicim an lá’, a line from Piaras Feiritéar translated by Kinsella as ‘a desolate waif scarce seeing the light of day’.130 Mahon was reading Kinsella’s An Duanaire on Achill and, though admitting he did not know ‘the first national language’, described the poem as an ‘attempt to recreate in English a certain kind of old Irish poetry’.131 A rare instance of Mahon grounding himself in the native tradition, it is paradoxically a poem of home-sickness, about separation from his wife and children on holiday in a Greek island. It sets his Irish world of ‘tin whistle’ and ‘turfsmoke’ where ‘The young sit smoking and laughing on the bridge at evening’—against ‘lights going on in the harbour | Of white-housed Náousa’. Though the poem brims with a sense of the western landscape, as when ‘A rain-shower darkens the schist for a minute or so’ and ‘Croagh Patrick towers like Naxos over the water’, he uses the resources of ‘old Irish poetry’ to articulate his connections to his absent family abroad: ‘And I think of my son a dolphin in the Aegean, |… And wish he were here where currachs walk on the ocean | To ease with his talk the solitude locked in my mind.’

‘Squince’ (CP 148) is a Graves-like lyric about a tiny seaside village in West Cork, but views it through a long lens. Looking at a dead salmon, he asks, referring to the legend of Finn, ‘Is this the salmon of knowledge | Or merely a

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