Search Results

“... contribution to Homage to Robert Frost (which he published in 1997 with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott) and in such poems as ‘Weighing In’ and ‘The Swing’ (an Ulster version of Frost’s ‘Birches’) in The Spirit Level (1996), the most recent book of his excerpted for Opened Ground. Of course, nothing in Heaney’s late poetics can change ...”

“... peasants and an abiding sense of menace and decay. In 1975, in his book of poems The Snow Party, Derek Mahon allowed one of his characters to be ‘through with history’. I understood that to be the whole point of revisionism. ‘In a country that has come of age, history need no longer be a matter of guarding sacred mysteries,’ Roy Foster wrote in ...”

“... England, thus it is difficult for Kiberd to have much to say about John Banville or Tom Murphy or Derek Mahon. And there are other writers, such as John McGahern, to whom these old dreams and inventions mean nothing at all, or those who found or find them worthy merely of jokes and asides, such as Flann O’Brien or Paul Muldoon. Inventing Ireland, in ...”

“... contact with other Gaels interested in the meaning of life, among them the poets Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon and the playwright Brian Friel. He had met Friel for the first time in Ireland in 1969 and the two began to correspond. They had much in common, both having attempted works in which young men deal with their fathers. Both were interested in faith ...”

“... line breaks, is correspondingly muted. Compare her translation of ‘The Old Woman of Beare’ to Derek Mahon’s version of the same Old Irish text. His woman is urbane, garrulous, much like Mahon himself, and his translation has after-echoes of the palatial Yeatsian stanza. Ní Chuilleanáin’s version is stonier ...”

“... impression one gets from such excellent poems as Michael Longley’s ‘The Linen Workers’ and Derek Mahon’s ‘A Refusal to Mourn’. In 1962, in The New Poetry, there were poems of similar kind and distinction, such as ‘A Peasant’, by R.S. Thomas, and Iain Crichton-Smith’s ‘Old Woman’. All four poems show that Hardy is still a dominant ...”

“... The ‘defining presences’ for many of these poets are, apparently, Auden, Ashbery, Bishop and Mahon. From these writers, we are told, the selected poets have learned to write ‘a poetry that understands that before it is moral, representational or empirical, it is above all sceptical.’ But first of all, the editors can’t mean both ‘before’ and ...”

“... idea of a camera as no mere keyhole but an agent of reciprocity is also found in Derek Mahon’s rich poem ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’: and Mahon turns up as the dedicatee of one of Dunn’s poems here.But it was with Elegies that Dunn caught the public imagination. These 39 poems written after ...”

“... the Thirties. The way in which poets as diverse as Heaney, Muldoon, Longley, McGuckian, Carson and Mahon are to a certain degree sustained by a single symbolic world is something that poets like Armitage and Maxwell are trying to copy. In Maurice Riordan’s first collection, A Word From the Loki, the title poem reflects the practice, which Northern Irish ...”