Search Results

“... Gaps on the poetry shelf support the claim that women writers felt excluded in Sixties Dublin. Derek Mahon, an eyewitness to literary life in Jammet’s back bar and the lounge of the Old Royal Hibernian Hotel, has agreed that Boland made her way in ‘a male-dominated literary culture’. He wonders whether it was necessary for her to ...”

“... Ireland of the Twenties through to the Fifties, and respond to the fine anger in the poems of Derek Mahon, Heaney’s most talented Ulster contemporary, when, in poems like ‘Glengormley’ and ‘Ecclesiastes’, he reminds us that the awful Ulster of our youth is far from dead. With these memories we would put our trust in the objectivity of ...”

“... The Burning Perch, appeared ten days after his death; a potboiler on astrology in 1964. When Derek Mahon declared, with resonant finality, in an elegy published in January 1965, ‘All we may ask of you we have; the rest/Is not for publication,’ he could hardly have been more wrong. Within months, MacNeice’s friend and first employer, the Greek ...”

“... Towards​ the end of 1997, Seamus Heaney wrote to his friend Derek Mahon from Magdalen College, Oxford. ‘Amigo, Here briefly, at the fall of the leaf,’ he began, archly but affably. ‘The deer-park misty, the choir angelic, the heart aswim.’ Mahon had just published The Yellow Book, a collection of long-lined, sophisticated poems steeped in Baudelaire and the fin de siècle ...”

“... Louis MacNeice’s verve, Keith Douglas’s ‘rich’ economy of style, the poise and subtlety of Derek Mahon; and singularly illuminating when she turns her attention to the work of Paul Muldoon: the long Muldoon poems ‘Immram’ and ‘The more a man has’, in particular, come in for impressive elucidation. Throughout this collection of essays, in ...”

“... of Irish poets, and (given that) to find him making several highly approbatory references to Derek Mahon without offering us even a paragraph of comment on him. Also, although Davie’s title seems to promise a revisionist setting of the last thirty years of British poetry under bare Ben Basil’s head, he nowhere makes such a coherent argument. His ...”

“... You find him in collections like Frank Ormsby’s Poets from the North of Ireland, and poets like Derek Mahon and Michael Longley praise him. The praise doesn’t come because he wrote about Northern Ireland – there are a few fine Irish poems, but not many. No, MacNeice’s importance for current Northern Irish poets must have more to do with the kind ...”

“... British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Elaine Feinstein are all variously ...”

“... Several of McKendrick’s selections do a similar thing similarly well: Umberto Saba translated by Derek Mahon, Ungaretti by Patrick Creagh, Maria Luisa Spaziani by Beverly Allen. But many others are more limited. In Biographia Literaria Coleridge illustrates the workings of metaphor with some made-up lines which do not pretend to be poetry but ...”

“... surprising, but that does not stop them from being powerful. Among his influences appears to be Derek Mahon, with whom he shares a slightly old-fashioned existentialist sensibility, Symptomatic of this is his over reliance on words like ‘city’, ‘winter’, ‘dark’, ‘light’, ‘time’ – one feels that the recurrent image of a train ...”

“... teaching jobs, in secondary schools and then at Queen’s; his literary life with Seamus Deane, Derek Mahon, Michael and Edna Longley, Philip Hobsbaum, and the workshop that Hobsbaum convened, the Group; and the grisly metamorphoses of Northern Irish public life, from simmering inequality and half-suppressed resentment into the worst of the ...”

“... the Troubles, critically important to a celebrated generation of Northern Irish poets, poets like Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Muldoon. These writers were led to him by content but stayed for the style. Auden or Eliot’s influence can be overwhelming for a writer, their tone is so settled, their territory staked out so thoroughly. But a novice poet ...”

“... with which it recuperates a cliché. In his emphasis on craft and wit Muldoon might seem akin to Derek Mahon: but, again, the two poets are finally quite different. Clearly Muldoon has learned from the older writer, and the long text which begins his book and ends his tape, ‘Gathering Mushrooms’, might never have been composed without the example of ...”

“... in public. There is nothing wrong with his themes – the IRA, a dead policeman, Joyce, Sligo, Derek Mahon, divorce, the woe that is in marriage, ‘our ruined century’, Othello, and one of the hotels in Newry. But most of them are approached by way of nothing more exacting than irritation: The only material for jokes is annoyance. The cruel course ...”

“... The engine hasn’t been used for a year – it has stood in Scott’s shed like an object in a Derek Mahon poem, oblivious to all that’s been happening in the world outside. It’s well over forty years old, so when we row out of the harbour and I jerk the cord again and again, and nothing happens, I get worried. Niall rests on the oars as I wind ...”