Derek Mahon

Derek Mahon in 2010. Photo by Marina Masinova. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Derek Mahon
Born	November 23 1941 (1941-11-23) Belfast, Northern Ireland
Occupation	Poet Journalist
Nationality	Irish
Genres	Poetry
Literary movement	Modernism
Influences Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, W.H. Auden, Eric Faherty
Influenced Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, Eamon Grennan

Derek Mahon (23 November 1941 – 1 October 2020) was a Northern Irish poet.

Life

Overview

Mahon was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland but lived in a number of cities around the world. At his death it was noted that his "influence in the Irish poetry community, literary world and society at large, and his legacy, is immense". President of Ireland Michael D Higgins said of Mahon "he shared with his northern peers the capacity to link the classical and the contemporary but he brought also an edge that was unsparing of cruelty and wickedness."

Youth and education

Mahon was born the only child of Ulster Protestant working-class parents. His father and grandfather worked at Harland & Wolff while his mother worked at a local flax mill.

During his childhood, he claims he was something of a solitary dreamer, comfortable with his own company yet aware of the world around him. Interested in literature from an early age, he attended Skegoneill Primary school and then the Royal Belfast Academical Institution RBAI.

At RBAI he encountered fellow students who shared his interest in literature and poetry. The school produced a magazine to which Mahon produced some of his early poems. His parents could not see the point of poetry, but he set out to prove them wrong after he won his school's Forrest Reid Memorial Prize for the poem ‘The power that gives the water breath‘.

Mahon pursued 3rd level studies at Trinity College, Dublin where he edited Icarus, and formed many friendships with writers such as Michael Longley, Eavan Boland and Brendan Kennelly. He started to mature as a poet. He left Trinity in 1965 to take up studies at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Career

After leaving the Sorbonne in 1966, Longley worked his way through Canada and the United States. In 1968, while spending a year teaching English at Belfast High School, he published his debut collection of poems Night Crossing. He later taught in a school in Dublin and worked in London as a freelance journalist. He lived in Kinsale, co. Cork.

On 1 October 2020, Mahon died in Cork after a short illness, aged 78.

He was survived by his partner Sarah Iremonger and his 3 children, Rory, Katy and Maisie.

Writing

Thoroughly educated and with a keen understanding of literary tradition, Mahon came out of the tumult of Northern Ireland with a formal, moderate, even restrained poetic voice. In an era of free verse, Mahon has often written in received forms, using a broadly applied version of iambic pentameter that, metrically, resembles the "sprung foot" verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Some poems rhyme.

Even the Irish landscape itself is never all that far from the classical tradition, as in his poem "Achill":

   Croagh Patrick towers like Naxos over the water
          And I think of my daughter at work on her difficult art
     And wish she were with me now between thrush and plover,
          Wild thyme and sea-thrift, to lift the weight from my heart.

He has also explored the genre of ekphrasis (the poetic reinterpretation of visual art). In that respect he has been interested in 17th century Dutch and Flemish art.

At times expressing anti-establishment values, Mahon has described himself as, an ‘aesthete’ with a penchant ‘for left-wingery […] to which, perhaps naively, I adhere.’

Critical reputation

According to critic Hugh Haughton Mahon's early poems were highly fluent and extraordinary for a person so young.

Mahon has been cited as a major influence by a number of Irish poets, including Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland and Eamon Grennan.

Recognition

On 23 March 2007 Mahon was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. He won the Poetry Now Award in 2006 for his collection, Harbour Lights, and again in 2009 for his Life on Earth collection.

In popular culture

In March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, RTÉ News ended its evening broadcast with Mahon reading his poem Everything Is Going to Be All Right.

Awards

• 1965 – Eric Gregory Award for poetry
• 1989 – Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize
• 1990 – Lannan Literary Awards for Poetry
• 1992 – The Irish Times-Aer Lingus Poetry Prize
• 1995 – Honorary doctorate Trinity College, Dublin.
• 2001 – Honorary doctorate NUI Galway – for work reflecting the enduring aesthetic of achievement in contemporary Irish writing.
• 2007 – David Cohen Prize for Literature – in recognition of his ‘lifetime’s achievement’
• Member, Aosdána
• Irish Academy of Letters Award
• Guggenheim Fellowship
• 2020 – Irish Times Poetry Now award

Publications

Poetry

• Twelve Poems. Belfast: Festival Publications, 1967.
• Design for a Grecian Urn. Erato Press, 1967.
• Night-Crossing. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1968.
• Ecclesiastes. Phoenix Pamphlet Poets, 1969.
• Beyond Howth Head. Dolmen, 1970.
• Lives. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1972.
• The Man Who Built His City in the Snow. London: Poem-of-the-Month Club, 1972.
• The Snow Party. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1975.
• (With Seamus Heaney) In Their Element: A Selection of Poems. Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1977.
• Light Music. Ulsterman Publications, 1977.
• The Sea in Winter (illustrations by Timothy Engelland). Deerfield Press, 1979.
• Poems, 1962-1978. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1979.
• Courtyards in Delft. Gallery Books, 1981.
• The Hunt by Night. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1982.
• A Kensington Notebook. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1984.
• Antarctica. Gallery Press, 1986.
• Selected Poems. Gallery Press, 1990; New York: Viking, 1991.
• The Yaddo Letter. Gallery Press, 1992.
• The Hudson Letter. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1996.
• The Yellow Book. Gallery Press, 1997.
• Roman Script. Gallery Press, 1999.
• Collected Poems. Gallery Press, 1999.
• The Seaside Cemetary (drawings by Fionnuala Nå Chiosain). Gallery Press, 2001.
• Resistance Days. Gallery Press, 2001.
• Harbour Lights, Gallery Press, 2005.
• Somewhere the Wave. Gallery Press, 2007.
• Life on Earth. Gallery Press, 2008.
• An Autumn Wind. Gallery Press, 2010.

Plays

• High Time (1-act play based on Moliere's comedy The School for Husbands; first produced in Belfast at the Lyric Theatre, October, 1984). Gallery Books, 1985.
• The School for Wives (2-act play based on Moliere's comedy of the same name). Gallery Books, 1986.
• The Bacchae: After Euripides (play), Gallery Books (Oldcastle, Co. Meath, Ireland), 1991.

Prose

• Journalism: Selected prose, 1970-1995 (edited by Terence Brown). Gallery Press, 1996.
• Foreword to John Minihan, An Unweaving of Rainbows: Images of Irish writers. London: Souvenir Press, 1998.

Translated

• Gerard de Nerval, The Chimeras. Gallery Books, 1982.
• Raphaele Billetdoux, Night without Day. Viking, 1987.
• Philippe Jaccottet, Selected Poems. Penguin, 1988.
• Racine's Phaedra. Gallery Books, 1996.
• When Tunnels Meet: Contemporary Romanian Poetry (translated with others; edited by John Fairleigh). Bloodaxe, 1996.
• Saint-John Perse, Birds. Gallery Press, 2002.
• Edmund Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac: A new version of Edmund Rostand's "Heroic comedy". Gallery Press, 2004.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Audio / video

'Everything Is Going To Be All Right' - Derek Mahon

• Derek Mahon (cassette). London: British Council, 1973.
• Derek Mahon Reads His Poetry (audiobook). Ceimini, 1973.
• Freedom and Necessity in Irish Verse (tape). New York: Academy of American Poets, 1988.

Except where noted, discographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of Irish poets

References

• Allen Randolph, Jody. Derek Mahon: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Irish University Review: Special Issue: Derek Mahon 24.1 (Spring/Summer 1994): 131–156.
• Cooke, Belinda (Jun–Jul 2014). "Nasty, brutish and short". The London Magazine: 99–104.  Review of Echo's grove.
• Enniss, Stephen (2014) After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon, Gill & Macmillan
• Haughton, Hugh. The Poetry of Derek Mahon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Jarniewicz, Jerzy. Ekphrasis in the Poetry of Derek Mahon, Piotrkow: NWP Press, 2013, pp. 275, Template:ISBN
• Reggiani, Enrico. In Attesa della Vita, Introduzione alla Poetica di Derek Mahon, Vita e Pensiero, Milano 1996, pp. 432 [seconda ristampa: 2005]
• Steare, Christopher. Derek Mahon : a study of his poetry, London: Greenwich Exchange, 2017, Template:ISBN

Fonds

Mahon's papers are held at Emory University.

External links

Poems

• "A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford" from The Poem.
• Derek Mahon profile & 1 poem ("Achill") at the Academy of American Poets.
• Poem of the Week: "The Seasons" at The Guardian
• Derek Mahon b. 1941 at the Poetry Foundation.
• Derek Mahon at Poetry International (7 poems)

Audio / video

• Griffin Poetry Prize reading, including video clip
• Derek Mahon at YouTube

Books

• Derek Mahon at Amazon.com

About

• Griffin Poetry Prize biography
• Eamonn Grennan (Spring 2000). "Derek Mahon, The Art of Poetry No. 82". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/732/the-art-of-poetry-no-82-derek-mahon. 
• "Painting into Poetry: The case of Derek Mahon" by Rajeev S. Patke.