[ad_1]
Derek Mahon, one of the leading contemporary Irish poets, died in Cork on Thursday night after a brief illness. He was 78 years old.
His poem Everything will be fine, a short letter of consolation and determined optimism, captured for many the national mood in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic.
He will also be remembered for reflective poems such as A Disused Shed in County Wexford, A Refusal to Mourn, Beyond Howth Head, his elegy for Louis MacNeice and his epistolary verse sequences, The Hudson Letter and The Yellow Book.
A member of Aosdána, his many honors include the Lannan Literary Poetry Prize (1990); Irish Times-Aer Lingus Poetry Award (1992); the David Cohen Prize for Literature (2007); and this year’s Irish Times Poetry Now award.
Born in Belfast in 1941, Mahon has primarily resided in the Republic since his student days at Trinity College and had lived in Kinsale for the past decades.
With his early poems, Mahón distinguished himself as an exceptionally gifted member of the younger generation of poets that emerged in the late 1960s. A review of his debut collection, Night Crossing, published in 1968, referred to the “vitality of the image ”, and this deft ability as a creator of the radiant poetic image was his remarkable gift.
Mahon’s role models and influences were MacNeice and the poet he described as “the bear in the floppy slippers of St. Mark’s Place,” Auden, but his magnificent body of work from the past 50 years may be an achievement like that of they. Accuracy and elegance are some of its hallmarks; crystalline language and coherence of thought come together in a poem by Mahón. He was a disciplined teacher of the formal poem whose verses never failed to produce a musical resonance. Almost all the poems came in a moment of enlightenment.
Derek Mahon, left, with his editor Peter Fallon of Gallery Press
He shared Beckett’s grim vision of the crudest everyday realities, a vision that often motivated his work and imagination, particularly the early poems that looked at the loneliness and desolation of the human condition. But the humor that abounds in Beckett matches the wit that Mahon pours throughout his work, often in those poems that demonstrate his talent for acute social observation.
His search in many of the early poems was to question and explore the northern Protestant mindset, aware of what he once called “the complexity of the continuing Irish past.” In a letter to this newspaper in 1987, he clearly distanced himself from his contemporaries in the North. However, in many early poems its Norse origin is far from being forgotten, and few poets have so resonantly evoked the details of the place as in poems such as Autobiographies, North Wind: Portrush, Derry Morning.
Since Harbor Lights, published by Gallery Press in 2005, when he was 64 years old, a remarkable late flowering and a renewed spirit produced a work of the first order, reminding us that here was an aging poet but keeping in touch with the modern world, its culture and customs. and what he discerned as his false values, as well as his 21st century predicaments, particularly in regards to the state of the planet and environmental anxieties. Harbor Lights, as well as Life on Earth (2008) and Against the Clock (2018), won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. His final collection, Washing, is released this month.
Hans Kung, left, Derek Mahon and the Reverend Michael Hurley SJ received their honorary degrees from Trinity College in 1995. Photo: Jack McManus
The town of Kinsale, which has been his home for many years, is celebrated in several of the later poems. He was also the author of brilliant journalistic commentaries and essays, and wrote a regular letter from New York to The Irish Times during his tenure there in the 1980s. .
In The Sea in Winter, Mahón describes himself as a poet “Scribbling in chance …” and in Un curious ghost he tells us that he “fell into lyrical madness.” This lyrical and casual madness resulted in poetry of profound depth and grace from a poet who throughout his career maintained and expanded his universal sensibility.
Derek Mahon was a poet from the “Global Village,” a title he gave to one of his Hudson Letters.
[ad_2]