Abstract
‘Even now there are places where a thought might grow’ (SP 36, P 79):1 this, the first line of Mahon’s ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wex-ford’, with its minimalist’s suggestion of reduced and exacerbated conditions set against an eccentricity of defiance might provoke a thought or two of our own about the nature of Mahon’s poetry and of poetry in general.
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Notes
Derek Mahon, Poems 1962–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) brings together most of the poems from his first three collections: Night-Crossing (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), Lives (London: Oxford University Press, 1972) and The Snow Party (London: Oxford University Press, 1975). Except for the new poems which completed Poems, and earlier poems which were omitted from this volume, page references (in parenthesis in the text) will be to both original and collected appearances with the following abbreviations for the titles: P, NC, L, SP. Where poems or their titles have been revised, I have used the revised forms.
John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (London: Secker and Warburg, 1961).
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) p. 21.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, tr. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980) p. 35.
William James, ‘The Dilemma of Determinism’, in A William James Reader, ed. Gay W. Allen (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1971). p. 20.
William James, Some Problems of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979) p. 39.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Bog Queen’, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975) p. 32.
Derek Mahon, The Hunt by Night (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) contains, amongst others, most of the poems which first appeared in Courtyards in Delft (Dublin: Gallery Press, 1981). Except for poems which appear only in the later volume, page references (in parenthesis in the text) will be to both original and later appearances with the following abbreviations for the titles: HBN, CID. Where poems or their titles have been revised, I have used the revised forms.
Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Self-Portrait’, in Collected Pruse (London: Martin Brian and O’Keeffe, 1973) pp. 13, 20, 22.
Quoted in Derek Mahon, Antarctica (Dublin: Gallery Press, 1985) p. 33.
W. B. Yeats: Selected Poetry, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Pan Books, 1974) p. 158.
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© 1992 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Andrews, E. (1992). The Poetry of Derek Mahon: ‘places where a thought might grow’. In: Andrews, E. (eds) Contemporary Irish Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-80425-2_12
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