Front cover image for The poetry of Derek Mahon

The poetry of Derek Mahon

"Derek Mahon, born in Belfast in 1942, 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 and craft of poetry, and to forging a poetic idiom pitched against the realities of modernity. He has also been a committed reviser of his work, believing the poem to be more than a completed record in verse, but a work of art never finished." "This virtuoso study by Hugh Haughton provides a comprehensive account of Mahon's oeuvre, in the context of Northern Irish writing and modern poetry more generally. Haughton's brilliant writing always serves and illuminates the poetry, yielding extraordinary insights on almost every page. The poetry, his revisions and reception, are its subject, but the book also offers a compelling intellectual biography of the poet and an account of Irish poetry vital to our understanding of the times."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2007
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007
Criticism, interpretation, etc
vii, 402 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780199215447, 0199215448
123113539
1. Introduction : the poetics of home
2. Forging an identity : 'Night-crossing'
3. The ironic conscience : 'Lives'
4. The poetry of afterlives : 'The snow party'
5. Writing crisis : 'The sea in winter'
6. The time of exile : 'The hunt by night' and 'Antarctica'
7. Poet in New York : 'The Hudson letter'
8. 'The yellow book' and the 'Fin de siècle'
9. A new wave : 'Harbour lights.'
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