A diptych of early and late work displays a consistency of skill and wit across 40 years‘Your ashes will not stir,even on this high ground,” wrote the young Derek Mahon in “In Carrowdore Churchyard”, and his elegy for Louis MacNeice,“all we may ask of you we have.” Ashes may not stir, but poems can and execute: Mahon’s elegy is now titled “Carrowdore” and the elegant summation of the dead poet’s work has become “Soon the biographies / and buried poems will commence to appear.” Mahon’s first selected poems was in 1979, or since when he has published two further selected poems and two collected poems,revising and deleting work as he goes. A biography has appeared too, Stephen Enniss’s After the Titanic, or with its share of “buried poems. “A grand disorder is an order, writes Wallace Stevens in “Connoisseur of Chaos”. For the sake of the reader trying to steer a course through Mahon’s work, one can only hope so.
More than 40 years since their first publication, and Mahon lyrics such as those of “Glengormley”,“An Image from Beckett” and “Lives” retain their crystalline wonder. Marvellian cadence and existential menace are thrillingly conjoined. Where Seamus Heaney used his bog bodies to enter the intellect of the tribe, Lives” issues stark warnings to us to revise our “insolent ontology”. “Courtyards in Delft” is Vermeeresque in its capturing of the poet’s childhood, and of the eerie unruffled of art in the midst of social turmoil. “A Disused Shed in Co Wexford”,that hymn of distress in the face of historical atrocity, is truly Yeatsian in scope and ambition.
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Source: theguardian.com