Rundale

Ciarán O’Rourke

When he died in 2020, Derek Mahon was regarded (by The Irish Times) as a “truculent character” who happened to be “one of the great poets of his generation”. In the years since, he has been the subject of a number of posthumous academic and cultural tributes, and a single-volume edition of his Poems: 1961-2020 has been issued by The Gallery Press. Whether we’re any closer to understanding this most complex of writers, of course, is an open question.

Truculence or no, there was wryness and even modesty in Mahon’s view of himself, in his words, as “a make-believe existentialist” and “prickly autodidact”, or “a surly étranger in a donkey jacket, with literary pretensions.” Such comical self-projections could do little to detract from his originality and achievement. Read today, he seems unusual among his immediate contemporaries in Ireland – with the possible exception of Michael Hartnett (1941-1999) – for the uncompromising critiques of empire and capital encoded into his work, and for the searching eco-socialism he elaborated over the course of his career.

“Nothing to lose but our chains, our chains gone”, he wrote in ‘Decadence’, quoting The Communist Manifesto,while surveying “the pastiche paradise of the post-modern” society around him, saturated with “the ersatz, the pop, the phoney”. Stray dreamers like himself, meanwhile, were condemned to “reverie”, imagining a utopia of “zero-growth economics and seasonal change /  in a world without cars, computers / or nuclear skies”. At a time when the mainstream of contemporary Irish poetry seemed increasingly localised and politically agnostic, Mahon had developed a knack for thinking and writing in world-historical terms.

“While the frozen armies trembled / at the gates of Leningrad”, he said, “they took me home in a taxi / and put me in my cot”. Raised in Belfast (“a city of rough politics / and murderous religions”) in a working-class, Protestant household, Mahon – who later refused the Queen’s Medal for Poetry – was unfussy in identifying as Irish. “Whatever we mean by ‘the Irish situation’,” he remarked, “the shipyards of Belfast are no less a part of it than a country town in the Gaeltacht.” “Us Ulster Protestants are supposed to have an identity crisis”, he noted during a radio interview in 2007: “Nonsense! We belong here in Ireland, where we were born.”

Curiously, for much of his life Mahon was portrayed by critics as an intelligent stylist, on the run from history – or as Neil Corcoran put it, a “cosmopolitan sophisticate”, whose “zestfully ironic modes” outpaced any discernibly consistent politics. Even Tom Paulin, known for his boisterously radical proclivities, could perpetuate the illusion. “At some point in his brilliant youth”, he wrote, “Mahon must have faced the choice between perfection of the life or of the work – he chose the latter and made a religion of art. Thus he is an intransigent aesthete who rejects life almost completely”. This seems like an energetic misinterpretation, at best. “We belong to this” world, Mahon asserted, “not as discrete / observing presences but as born / participants in the action”.

A lurking discomfort nonetheless lingered between the lines. In general, Mahon’s poems blend an evocative feeling for place with a persistent impression of being ill-at-ease with settled assumptions and inherited locales. The hearth – for Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, a generative motif – scarcely appears in his poetry, while the twilit suburban milieux memorialized by Eavan Boland seem to have afforded him only intermittent solace (he was never a property-owner). His poem ‘Afterlives’ hunkers in a fog of claustrophobia and disquiet, as the author, returned to Belfast from London, wonders introspectively: “Perhaps if I’d stayed behind / and lived it bomb by bomb / I might have grown up at last / and learnt what is meant by home.”

For all the dense particularity of his work, brimming with sharp-angled illuminations, Mahon was partial, too, to panoramic vistas. There was a strand in his writing that remained unerringly conscious of the hubris accompanying human affairs, when compared to the immensity of natural and cosmic forces. “I think there’s a sense in which the human race flatters itself,” he once remarked, “takes too much for granted in its own status as the articulate centre of the universe.” “Your best poem,” he proffered, as well as “the very language in which the poem / was written, and the idea of language, / all these things will pass away in time.”

The poet, however, was temperamentally averse to passivity, philosophical or literary. Across his oeuvre, a dialectic not only of place and transit, permanence and change, but of omnipotence and deracination, dereliction and flourishing, recurs in poems that can be disarming in their mixture of tonal candour and crafted elegance. Adapting Yeats, he could picture a matinal scene, gritty and surreal in equal measure: a “cock crows good-morning from an oil drum / like a peacock on a rain barrel in Byzantium.” In ‘Ovid in Tomis’, likewise, conjuring the Roman poet’s years of exile, the death of “Pan” – the god of wild things – is signalled by “the six-foot reeds” that sway “bulk-destined // for pulping machines / and the cording /of motor-car tyres”. The metamorphosis, Mahon perceived, which classical mythology assumed as a literary trope, had been co-opted as an active tenet of industrial civilisation, and realised on a planetary scale.

Few Irish poets have made it their business to diagnose the corrosive effects of capitalist accumulation as keenly as Mahon did, nor linked the latter so explicitly to the operations of global (meaning, for him, American) militarism. The “grisly aim” of “Washington”, he posited, was “to render the whole earth the same”, unleashing “B52s to make it / safe for Chase and the stock market.” In a poem for Carolyn Forché, he continued:

… every life-hating dictator

had the cool patronage of the White House

in coming down hard on the indigenous

and anyone – Romero or Guevara –

crazy enough to speak for the rural poor.

A similar internationalism may inflect an earlier piece, ‘Leaves’, from The Snow Party (1975). In the poem, the titular “prisoners of infinite choice” have “built their house / In a field below the wood”. “Somewhere there is an afterlife / Of dead leaves,” we’re told, “A stadium filled with an infinite / Rustling and sighing”:

Somewhere in the heaven

Of lost futures

The lives we might have lived

Have found their own fulfilment.

An enigmatic fragment, ‘Leaves’ feels shot through with political melancholy: a quietly kaleidoscopic poem, in which it’s possible, for instance, to catch refracted glimpses of the coup against Allende’s socialist government in Chile, two years earlier. The “stadium filled with an infinite / Rustling and sighing” may hold a whisper of those thousands of Chileans tortured and executed in the Estadio Chile on Pinochet’s orders, just as the “prisoners of infinite choice” seem subtly indicative of a citizenry whose democratic rights have been removed in favour of a deregulated market, where Milton Friedman’s consumerist dream of “infinite choice” has assumed an ominous reality. Importantly, ‘Leaves’ is not an explicit allegory so much as a site of sad meditation, a space where “the haunting spectre of a future lost” (to quote another poem) can breathe in peace.

Mahon’s sense of deep history could also shine with a Shelleyan fervour, exposing the fragile grandiosity of greed and dominion. Echoing both ‘Ozymandias’ and ‘Ode to a Skylark’, ‘Ovid in Tomis’, again, reconfigures the sound of rising birdsong as a riposte to worldly power. “I often sit in the dunes”, it reads, revising Shelley’s famous vista of “lone and level sands” that “stretch far away”,

listening hard

to the uninhibited

virtuosity of a lark

serenading the sun

and meditate upon

the transience

of earthly dominion,

the perfidy of princes.

There may also be a guarded literary salute to Bobby Sands here, for whom, in the hunger striker’s words, “the imprisonment of the lark” was “a crime of the greatest cruelty because the lark is one of the greatest symbols of freedom and happiness” (‘Ovid in Tomis’ first appeared in the winter 1983/84 issue of Stand magazine). Discerning, multi-faceted, debonair, and radical, Mahon’s poetry abounds in such resonances, earthing his lyricism in the realm of moral inquiry and historical understanding.

Always an intellectual, Mahon ended his days as a resolute proponent of revolutionary transformation, advocating for “the ownership of the country” to be devolved “to the people of the country, not the few”. If “the bold Cubans could do it,” he asked, “why not us?” “Not easy”, he concluded, “to undo the cleverly complex / structures”, or to “expose the crude subtext / of profit frenzy some facilitate / for their own reasons; but it’s not too late”. Among other things, The Poems might be understood as a roadmap and rallying-call, a salmagundi of anti-capitalist thought, nourishing “the fond dream / of a subversive future when / ‘financial services’ break down.” Mahon, Ireland’s socialist laureate, kept that dream alive.