In the following essay, Redmond compares Mahon's verse-letters to the work of W. H. Auden to highlight his use of a casual tone. Also drawing from Auden's essay on “Light Verse,” Redmond contends that Mahon's efforts to seem casual or self-effacing are undermined by their apparent artfulness.

In the following essay, Clutterbuck interprets Mahon's position on the link between art and reality as negative and sometimes cynical, doubting the existence of meaning in either art or life.

In the following essay, Steele emphasizes Mahon's relationship to other poets and the role of art in his poetry.

In the following essay, Bakken reflects on Mahon's attitude toward work in his Collected Poems. Bakken sees in Mahon's verse a strong sense of irony and a critical nature, both of which Mahon often turns on himself and his art.

In the following essay, Kendall looks at Mahon's relation to his birthplace of Belfast, Ireland. Kendall sees in Mahon a strong rejection of Belfast and a discomfort with his connection to the city, but he argues that Mahon depends upon Belfast as the inspiration for his best work.

In the following essay, Duytschaever applies Walter Benjamin's literary theory to Mahon's poetry and his attitude toward history. Duytschaever sees in both Benjamin and Mahon an ambivalence toward history and the transcendence of art.

In the following excerpt, McDonald notes the influence of Irish poet Louis MacNeice on Mahon's work, particularly in the themes of loneliness and alienation. He highlights the younger poet's affinity for his predecessor's resignation to the relentlessness of time and temporality.

In the following essay, Mullaney links Mahon's observations on silence to his relationship to the violence in Ireland. Mullaney reads silence as a representation of oppressed voices, as a commentary on the empty talk of political figures, and as an optimistic indication of the potential to return to peace.

In the following essay, Johnston looks at the tension between art and history in Mahon's poetry, focusing on the poems from Poems 1962-1978. Johnston also considers Mahon's relationships with previous authors, through allusion, indirect homage, and influence.

In the following essay, Donnelly suggests that Mahon's poetic talent lies in his ability to merge lightness with serious subjects and technical and formal brilliance. Donnelly emphasizes Mahon's strong control of his poetic voice and skillful use of verse forms, rhyme, pacing, and the sound of the language.

In the following essay, Tinley emphasizes Mahon's connections to poets including Gérard de Nerval, Philippe Jaccottet, François Villon, Bertolt Brecht, and others to highlight the international quality of Mahon's work. Nonetheless, Tinley contends that Mahon's adaptations of European sources also reflect ambivalence about the poet's position as outsider.

In the following essay, Wilson discusses the importance of place in Mahon's poetry. He also observes a subtle shift in Mahon's treatment of popular culture in his works, moving away from a categorical rejection of contemporary life.

In the following essay, Williams describes Mahon's affinity for the perspective of the exile or outcast as one of the great strengths of his poetry. Williams also considers Mahon's stance towards the violence of Northern Ireland and the fine line between objectivity and indifference in the position of the outsider.

In the following essay, Brown discusses the strength of Mahon's visual observations, especially his careful attention to light. Reading several of Mahon's poems that describe works by a number of artists, Brown finds Mahon frequently meditating on the tension between the beauty of art and the brutality of life.

In the following essay, O'Neill examines the influence of American poetry on Mahon, citing Frank O'Hara and Hart Crane as important predecessors. O'Neill notes the importance of Mahon's outsider status in his approach to representing both place and time.

In the following essay, Frazier suggests that The Hunt by Night reflects a change in Mahon's work, away from regionalism, and away from attention-seeking tricks of poetic form and style.

In the following essay, Taylor addresses Mahon's relation to Ireland, suggesting that Mahon's position as detached artist allows him to revisit the realities of past and current strife with greater empathy and creativity.

With three published volumes of poetry behind him—Night-Crossing (1968), Lives (1972), The Snow Party (1975)—Derek Mahon has now clearly emerged as one of the most talented of the present generation of Northern Ireland poets. Indeed, in the wider context of English poetry of the last ten years, his work has retained qualities that looked increasingly likely to disappear with Auden's death—qualities of wit and wry humour in poems that reveal a lively and quirky intelligence. He ha...

In Derek Mahon's poetry it is possible to see what can be made of the Irish urban and suburban experience…. [Mahon] has produced a small body of remarkable verse, developing out of a sense of the complex, aesthetically uninspiring tensions of Northern Protestant middle-class identity. Mahon has spoken of the difficulties of writing out of such a background, from a 'suburban situation which has no mythology or symbolism built into it'…. (p. 192) In 'Glengormley...

In 'Tradition and the Individual Talent,' T. S. Eliot warns against the tendency to single out and praise those aspects of a writer's work 'in which he least resembles anyone else', adding that 'the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously'. This dictum is relevant in the case of Derek Mahon whose new collection, Poems 1962–1978, includes most of his previously colle...

[Mahon's] imagination seems to be at once haunted and attracted by the thought of a total apocalyptic disaster which would wipe out the mess of the modern world and leave instead only the ticking of "a slow clock of condensation." Yet his other favorite scenario, "the ideal society which will replace our own," is as elusive and as ironically observed as the apocalypse. For between these two falls the shadow of Belfast, the dark industrial waste in which Mr. Mahon goes time...

If events in Ireland have been thought malefic in their relations to the art of poetry (as they are to almost everything else) then that may be the reason why Heaney and Derek Mahon have both maintained two distinct styles apiece. One can be used for the racial-cum-archaeological manoeuvres of their imaginations, or simply the lyricism towards which they are drawn by temperament, and another for more direct utterance, for the kind of poem which, in their Irish circumstances, is expected of them. The formula...

Since the mid-1960s, several Northern Irish poets have made their presence felt in the English literary world. The most praised, Seamus Heaney, has been hailed by some critics as a major poet—the most important since William Butler Yeats. There is now a growing interest in his work in America. Like Heaney, Derek Mahon has established himself in England as a considerable talent. His three volumes of poems have now been gathered into Poems 1962–1978, which will serve as a good introduction to hi...

Two years ago Derek Mahon published what he called the 'selected collected' edition of his poems. It was, he said, 'in some senses, a first book, the kind of thing you put behind you before proceeding to the real business of learning and trying to create'. Understandably, he was uncertain about what this 'real business' might produce. Apart from outlawing 'impertinent rhetoricism', he was content simply to advertise himself as being 'at last in ...

In a verse letter by Michael Longley, a fellow Ulsterman, Derek Mahon is addressed approvingly as one of the "poetic conservatives". He might well take umbrage; for the spirit that emerges from his poems is one which, while it hungers for ceremony and inherited order, has only the wannest faith that ceremony survives or that such order has relevance. Wistful, reticent, resigned, the poems in The Snow Party sound like the fastidious reflections of self-imposed exile…. Lost futures, rathe...

The first poem in Derek Mahon's Lives is about arriving home in Dublin, distraught, after a Transatlantic flight: and something like the time- and place-confusion of jet-travellers gives the book its theme. The poems, written from that Atlantic island whose aerials are turned towards Britain and America, are about wanting to locate oneself, to decide to what parts of the human inheritance to direct one's aerial. Are signals still to be received from Raftery, the saints or Stone Age man? Or doe...

It is especially good to have Mahon's carefully edited 'selected collected' [Poems: 1962–1978]. It may be a little dismaying to find a poet under 40 devoting more time to tidying the drawers of his wardrobe than to adding new garments to it, but Mahon warns us that he may revise his poems still further, in the Auden manner. Mentioning Auden acts as a reminder that he and MacNeice issued their 'Collecteds' before their fortieth birthdays, and that precocious writers ...

Derek Mahon's new collection [The Hunt by Night] contains several poems good enough to place alongside his "A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford", a justly celebrated piece…. It is not only in his confident use of the familiar stanza form that Mahon can be seen as the Marvell amongst his contemporaries and compatriots. He is a truly witty writer, and his recent work reminds me of T. S. Eliot's observation that all too often one is confronted by "serious poets who seem afra...

No one has satisfactorily explained how it is that a whole young generation of Irish poets—Heaney, Mahon, Longley, Muldoon and others—is apparently devoted to the well-made poem at a time when their English, Scottish and to a smaller degree Welsh contemporaries have almost entirely thrown it overboard in favour either of grim fragments or of vapid maunderings. The longest poem in Derek Mahon's [Lives], "Beyond Howth Head", is of a shapely fluency which set the pattern for ...

Between Night Crossing in 1968 and his new collection, Lives, Derek Mahon produced a very promising … pamphlet called Ecclesiastes. It now looks like a bridge between a pleasant but slightly too romantic and too tidy early style and something much tougher and more ingenious. Lives is a very good book, difficult and cryptic, but far more versatile and skilful technically, and managing to be both original and moving about his troubled Irish settings without being derivative or simplistic. There is no c...

[Derek Mahon's collection Night Crossing] suffers from gentility…. He writes deftly, levelly, subtly, reminding one of the controlled mild ironies of Larkin, though he lacks Larkin's nostalgia and Larkin's particular usage of ennui and anxiety. Moreover, he does, from time to time, edge into romanticism and, in his Legacies, after Villon, he reveals considerable rhythmical vitality and some sardonic gusto. This is a good book, but a safe book. It was the Choice of the British Poe...