The Poetry of Derek Mahon

Derek Mahon 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 of poetry and the craft of making verse. He has also been no-less a committed reviser of his work, believing the poem to be more than a record in verse, but a work of art never finished. This virtuoso study by Hugh Haughton provides the most comprehensive account imaginable of Mahon's oeuvre. Haughton's brilliant writing always serves and illuminates the poetry, yielding extraordinary insights on almost every page. The poetry, its revisions and reception, are the subject here, but so thorough is the approach that what is offered also amounts indirectly to an intellectual biography of the poet and with it an account of Northern Irish poetry vital to our understanding of the times.

Hugh Haughton was born in Cork, and is currently Senior Lecturer in English at the University of York. He has published widely on modern poetry and has edited many books, including The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry (1988), Second World War Poems (2004), and Freud's The Uncanny. He is co-editor (with Valerie Eliot) of The Letters of T. S. Eliot.

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 SIECLE
9. A NEW WAVE: HARBOUR LIGHTS