The Poetry Of Derek Mahon

Leading Irish poet Derek Mahon has written some of the key poems of our age. In this landmark study, Hugh Haughton opens up Mahon's work before our eyes, balancing critical overview with illuminating close readings. This work is one of the critical cornerstones for the understanding of Northern Irish poetry.

Represented in all modern anthologies by his great poem on Irish history A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, Derek Mahon is regarded with Heaney and Longley as the leader of the resurgence of Irish poetry from the late `60s onwards. He writes lyric poetry of enormous wit, elegance and scepticism. Penguin published his first Selected Poemsin 1990 - this new, expanded edition revisits the older work but also contains important new work from his most recent volume, Harbour Lights.

As the first major book-length study of the poetry of Derek Mahon, this volume of fourteen essays represents a long overdue account and assessment of one of the foremost living English-language poets. In considering the central issues of Mahon's poetry--the relation between poetry and politics, the conflicting claims of art and nature, the representation of gender, the importance of place, the poet's response to violence, and his characteristic techniques of displacement, ambiguity, and intertextuality--these essays also represent a variety of critical approaches to the poetry.

Derek Mahon is one of the leading poets of his time, both in Ireland and beyond, famously offering a perspective that is displaced from as much as grounded in his native country. From prodigious beginnings to prolific maturity, he has been, through thick and thin, through troubled times and other, a writer profoundly committed to the art of poetry and the craft of making verse. He has also been no-less a committed reviser of his work, believing the poem to be more than a record in verse, but a work of art never finished. This virtuoso study by Hugh Haughton provides the most comprehensive account imaginable of Mahon's oeuvre. Haughton's brilliant writing always serves and illuminates the poetry, yielding extraordinary insights on almost every page. The poetry, its revisions and reception, are the subject here, but so thorough is the approach that what is offered also amounts indirectly to an intellectual biography of the poet and with it an account of Northern Irish poetry vital to our understanding of the times.