DEREK MAHON

Hi Teresa,

I watched the rebroadcast RTE documentary, ‘This Poetry Nonsense,’ shortly

after Derek Mahon’s death in October. It was interesting biographically, if
understandably guarded about darker life events. (There was, by all accounts, a
more prurient biography published a few years ago by a chap called Stephen
Enniss. I might get it as I prefer the virtues I admire to be seasoned with a few
sins). Did you see the letter Peter Fallon wrote to the Irish Times following the
obituary they published? He expressed disappointment at the focus on his early
life and troubles (alcoholism etc) and the portrayal of him as a “truculent”
character. According to Fallon, this did not do justice to his “heroic recovery”
and the creative peace he found in Kinsale with his partner. That seems fair to
me.
I thought the documentary could have delved deeper in the poetry – an extended
discussion of ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ would have been welcome. I
checked it out after you mentioned it on our last Bots walk and it certainly is
remarkable. John Banville has flagged it as a candidate for “greatest single
poem by an Irish poet since Yeats.” You have more reason than me to disagree
with this – if you do! The trope of redemption from a tarnished world (“the
insane sound track/ of global capitalism” – ‘Cork in Old Photographs’) via
“disused places” and “disregarded, obsolete things” (‘The Flying Boats’) recurs
throughout Against the Clock, his penultimate collection. Sometimes the effects
are not initially promising (“A clearing in the wood/beyond technology, with
two/car doors disintegrating in a ditch” – ‘A Clearing’) but the same abandoned
or overlooked element is also the condition of what is: “It just keeps happening ;
life always finds/somewhere to whisper, thought a place to grow” (‘Rising
Late’). In the third poem of a sequence entitled ‘Trump Time,’ the against-the-
modern-grain condition is developed:
“Such things survive, beloved of poet and artist,
only where their despoilers havn’t noticed –
in a yard or hidden cove, out on the edge,
the rushy meadow and the fallow acre
ripe for development as industrial plant.
Serving as temple, shrine and sepulchre,
these places minister to the soul by
dint of radiating a strange air of privilege.”

That only in the second line is telling. It is as if the “despoilers,” and elsewhere
natural decay in general, are precisely the condition of possibility for the
existence of privileged places. Mahon is not a “beautiful soul” simply
denouncing and raging against a fallen techno-digital-corporate world. There is
“truculence” here but it is measured and counterpointed. Even his references to
the potentially disastrous effects of climate change (‘Ophelia,’ ‘The Rain
Forest,’ ‘Ivy’) do not have that bombastic and holier-than-thou strain you find
in some of the Greens. They are more rueful and grateful for small neglected
mercies. He also manages to celebrate the natural world without being pagan or
sentimental about it. (His is as much the “death of a naturalist,” in any simple
“pastoral” sense, as Heaney’s).
One of the things I love about this collection is that it provides a lesson in
comportment for anyone who, like me, finds the modern, digital, techno-
programmed world increasingly stifling, particularly its apotheosis in the
bureaucratised concentration camp that is the modern workplace. It is not a
question of nostalgia, of the libido flowing backwards (“Would I prefer old
times? Certainly not/The further back you go the worse they get”) but rather this
injunction, which I am tempted to pin to my desk: “So face the brave new world
with a wry grin/of tolerant irony; not with impotent hate” – ‘Brave New World.’
That, again, is a long distance from “truculence” but does not leave it behind
entirely. Mahon’s take on the modern world (or what he knows of it) is neither
that of a denouncing “beautiful soul” nor of a nostalgic conservative but rather
of one who is constantly on the lookout for what Freud called the “secondary
gain” from illness. Apparently, this extended even into his last months in our
Covid era. In the posthumous last collection, ‘Washing Up’ (a wonderful title,
condensing notions of domestic serenity and “wrapping up” as well as being
“washed up” or even washing up on shore like a dying whale) we hear that
“there reigns a shocked euphoria during this/short respite, this enforced
parenthesis.” Of course the “euphoria” has gone for most of us now as the
“respite grows longer, with no quick end in sight. Still.
I had hardly read a line of Mahon’s until his death in October. At present I have
read only ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ and the Against the Clock
collection. I came upon the above lines in a review of ‘Washing Up,’ which I
will get at the earliest opportunity.After that I will check out the broader oeuvre.
In the meantime, this penultimate collection has absorbed me more than any
single poetry collection in many a long year – perhaps Heaney’s Seeing Things
was the last. Like the late Yeats, Mahon uses the plainest words, more often
than not, to achieve startling effects. He doesn’t quite have Heaney’s lyrical
gift or “music” and is in some ways more “prosaic.” But that “prosaic” quality
has a cutting formal edge that perhaps Heaney doesn’t. (“Prosaic” is not the
right word) He is more at odds with the world (“out on the edge”) than Heaney
and his perspective is therefore different though not superior. (Beckett vis a vis
Joyce?) He also has a keener eye for what Freud called “our discontent in
civilisation,” and that means any civilisation, so there is in him a “truculent”
remainder beyond nostalgia or any kind of utopia, including the “natural” kind.
(“Give my head peace. Oh, take me back/to those pre-digital, pre-industrial
scenes/ or forward to a time of ...There. You see?/ Nothing will ever set my
mind at rest” – ‘Cork in Old Photographs’)
It is a pity this great poet had to go before he properly came to my attention.
Perhaps that is a Divine Law. In any case I am grateful to be reminded that – as
the first line of his most famous poem has it – “Even now there are places where
a thought might grow.”
Best wishes,
Hugh
P S No need to reply in kind to this. I’ve been preoccupied with Mahon since
November and welcome this brief window of opportunity to unpack some of the
many thoughts he has stirred in me. To be continued!

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/celebrating-derek-mahon-one-year-
on-1.4729306

https://www.tcd.ie/library/exhibitions/mahon/