• Source: Derek Mahon

      • Norman Derek Mahon (23 November 1941 – 1 October 2020) was an Irish poet. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland but lived in a number of cities around the world. At his death it was noted that his, "influence in the Irish poetry community, literary world and society at large, and his legacy, is immense". President of Ireland Michael D Higgins said of Mahon; "he shared with his northern peers the capacity to link the classical and the contemporary but he brought also an edge that was unsparing of cruelty and wickedness."


      Biography


      Derek Mahon was born on 23 November 1941 as the only child of Ulster Protestant working-class parents. His father and grandfather worked at Harland and Wolff while his mother worked at a local flax mill. During his childhood, he claims he was something of a solitary dreamer, comfortable with his own company yet aware of the world around him. Interested in literature from an early age, he attended Skegoneill Primary School and then the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, or "Inst".
      At Inst he encountered fellow students who shared his interest in literature and poetry. The school produced a magazine in which Mahon produced some of his early poems. According to the critic Hugh Haughton his early poems were highly fluent and extraordinary for a person so young. His parents could not see the point of poetry, but he set out to prove them wrong after he won his school's Forrest Reid Memorial Prize for the poem 'The power that gives the water breath'.
      Mahon pursued third level studies at Trinity College Dublin in French, English, and Philosophy and where he edited Icarus, and formed many friendships with writers such as Michael Longley, Eavan Boland and Brendan Kennelly. He started to mature as a poet. He left Trinity in 1965 to take up studies at the Sorbonne in Paris.
      After leaving the Sorbonne in 1966 he worked his way through Canada and the United States. In 1968, while spending a year teaching English at Belfast High School, he published his first collection of poems Night Crossing. He later taught in a school in Dublin and worked in London as a freelance journalist. He lived in Kinsale, County Cork. On 23 March 2007, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. He won the Poetry Now Award in 2006 for his collection, Harbour Lights, and again in 2009 for his Life on Earth collection.
      At times expressing anti-establishment values, Mahon has described himself as, an 'aesthete' with a penchant 'for left-wingery [...] to which, perhaps naively, I adhere.'
      His papers are held at Emory University.
      In March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, RTÉ News ended its evening broadcast with Mahon reading his poem Everything Is Going to Be All Right.
      On 1 October 2020, Mahon died in Cork after a short illness, aged 78.
      He is survived by his partner Sarah Iremonger and his three children, Rory, Katy, and Maisie.


      Style


      Thoroughly educated and with a keen understanding of literary tradition, Mahon came out of the tumult of Northern Ireland with a formal, moderate, even restrained poetic voice. In an era of free verse, Mahon often wrote in received forms, using a broadly applied version of iambic pentameter that, metrically, resembles the "sprung foot" verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Some poems rhyme. Even the Irish landscape itself is never all that far from the classical tradition, as in his poem "Achill":

      Croagh Patrick towers like Naxos over the water
      And I think of my daughter at work on her difficult art
      And wish she were with me now between thrush and plover,
      Wild thyme and sea-thrift, to lift the weight from my heart.
      He has also explored the genre of ekphrasis: the poetic reinterpretation of visual art. In that respect, he was interested in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art.


      Bibliography




      = Poetry

      =
      Mahon features on the Irish Leaving Certificate course with ten of his poems (Grandfather, Day Trip to Donegal, Ecclesiastes, After the Titanic, As It Should Be, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, Rathlin, The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush, Kinsale and Antarctica)[1].


      Collections


      1965: Twelve Poems. Festival Publications, Belfast
      1968: Night-Crossing. Oxford University Press
      1970: Ecclesiastes Phoenix Pamphlet Poets
      1970: Beyond Howth Head. Dolmen Press
      1972: Lives. Oxford University Press
      1975: The Snow Party. Oxford University Press
      1977: In Their Element. Arts Council of Northern Ireland
      1979: Poems 1962–1978. Oxford University Press
      1981: Courtyards in Delft. Gallery Press
      1982: The Hunt By Night. Oxford University Press
      1985: Antarctica. Gallery Press
      1990: The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush: Selected Poems. Gallery Press
      1991: Selected Poems. Viking
      1992: The Yaddo Letter. Gallery Press
      1995: The Hudson Letter. Gallery Press; Wake Forest University Press, 1996
      1997: The Yellow Book. Gallery Press; Wake Forest University Press, 1998
      1999: Collected Poems. Gallery Press
      2001: Selected Poems. Penguin
      2005: Harbour Lights. Gallery Press (winner of the 2006 Irish Times Poetry Now Award)
      2007: Somewhere the Wave. Gallery Press
      2008: Life on Earth. Gallery Press (shortlisted for the 2009 International Griffin Poetry Prize; winner of the 2009 Irish Times Poetry Now Award)
      2010: An Autumn Wind. Gallery Press
      2011: New Collected Poems. Gallery Press
      2016: New Selected Poems. Faber & Faber; Gallery Press
      2020: Washing Up. Gallery Press
      2021: The Poems (1961-2020). Gallery Press


      Translations / versions / editions


      1982: The Chimeras (a version of Les Chimères, by Nerval), Gallery Press
      1985: High Time (a version of Molière's A School for Husbands), Gallery Press
      1988: The Selected Poems of Philippe Jaccottet, Viking, 1988.
      1996: The Bacchae of Euripides, and Racine's Phaedra, Gallery Press
      2001. Jonathan Swift. Poems selected by Derek Mahon. Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-20715-2.
      2002: Birds (a version of Oiseaux, by Saint-John Perse), Gallery Press
      2004: Cyrano de Bergerac. (A version of the play by Edmond Rostand), Gallery Press
      2005: Oedipus (A conflation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus), Gallery Press
      2006: Adaptations (A collection of versions, rather than translations proper, from poets such as Pasolini, Juvenal, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Valéry, Baudelaire, Rilke and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill), Gallery Press
      Mahon, Derek (2013). Echo's grove : collected translations. The Gallery Press.


      = Non fiction

      =
      1996: Journalism: selected prose, 1970–1995. Ed. Terence Brown. Gallery Press


      = Critical studies and reviews of Mahon's work

      =
      Enniss, Stephen (2014) After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon, Gill & Macmillan
      Haughton, Hugh (2007) The Poetry of Derek Mahon, Oxford University Press
      Jarniewicz, Jerzy (2013) Ekphrasis in the Poetry of Derek Mahon, NWP Piotrkow, ISBN 978-83-7726-056-2
      Cooke, Belinda (June–July 2014). "Nasty, brutish and short". The London Magazine: 99–104. Review of Echo's grove.


      Honours


      1965 – Eric Gregory Award for poetry
      1989 – Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize
      1990 – Lannan Literary Awards for Poetry
      1992 – The Irish Times-Aer Lingus Poetry Prize
      1995 – Honorary doctorate Trinity College Dublin.
      2001 – Honorary doctorate NUI Galway – for work reflecting the enduring aesthetic of achievement in contemporary Irish writing.
      2007 – David Cohen Prize for Literature – in recognition of his 'lifetime's achievement'
      Member, Aosdána
      Irish Academy of Letters Award
      Guggenheim Fellowship
      2020 – Irish Times Poetry Now award


      See also



      List of Northern Irish writers


      References




      Further reading


      Allen Randolph, Jody. Derek Mahon: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Irish University Review: Special Issue: Derek Mahon 24.1 (Spring/Summer 1994): 131–156.
      Reggiani, Enrico. In Attesa della Vita, Introduzione alla Poetica di Derek Mahon, Vita e Pensiero, Milano 1996, pp. 432 [seconda ristampa: 2005]
      Haughton, Hugh. The Poetry of Derek Mahon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
      Jarniewicz, Jerzy. Ekphrasis in the Poetry of Derek Mahon, Piotrkow: NWP Press, 2013, pp. 275, ISBN 978-83-7726-056-2
      Christopher Steare: Derek Mahon : a study of his poetry, London : Greenwich Exchange, 2017, ISBN 978-1-910996-08-9


      External links



      Eamonn Grennan (Spring 2000). "Derek Mahon, The Art of Poetry No. 82". The Paris Review. Spring 2000 (154).
      Derek Mahon's page at Wake Forest University Press
      Griffin Poetry Prize biography
      Griffin Poetry Prize reading, including video clip
      "Achill" from poets.org.
      "A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford" from The Poem.
      "Painting into Poetry: The Case of Derek Mahon" by Rajeev S. Patke.
      Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University: Derek Mahon papers, 1948–2018
      Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University: Derek Mahon collection, 1985–1988, 1991, 2000
      Letters and postcards from Derek Mahon to Louis Asekoff from 1963 to 1988: Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University: Letters to Louis Asekoff, 1963–1988
      Portraits of Derek Mahon at the National Portrait Gallery, London

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