The Yellow Book by Derek Mahon Gallery Press 58pp, £12.95/£6.95
The American poet Robert Lowell spoke of one of his books being "lemony". Derek Mahon's new collection, The Yellow Book, is one of the most lemony books I have read in a long long time. It's also powerful.
A sequence of twenty sections, following on from part two of The Hudson Letter (1995), make this long poem epic in its desire to portray our fin de siecle. Gustav Klimt's Mermaids encauled on the front cover look like spooky genii released from time in much the same way that the poetic spirit of these poems yearns to float free from the unengaging, superficial and decadent Here and Now.
The Celtic Tiger is no Blakean vision, but in The Yellow Book Mahon calls to account the current state of being in a way that few, if any, writers are prepared to do. What these poems rail against is a spiritual vacuity and cultural hype of self-astonishment:
What, in our new freedom, have we left to say?
Oh, poets can eat now, painters can buy paint
but have we nobler poetry, happier painting
than when the gutters bubbled, the drains stank
and hearts bobbed to the clappers in the sanctuary?
Mahon's poems are haunted by the good old bad times. The embattled stoicism of The Yellow Book includes as hero Austin Clarke, unlikely Sixties Belfast, Dublin and London, and a Swiftian misanthropy at full throttle:
Everything aspires to the condition of rock music.
Besieged by Shit, Sperm, Garbage, Gristle, Scum
and other `raucous trivia', we take refuge
from fan migrations, police presence, road rage,
narcotics, Abrakebabra, festive rowdytum,
from Mick and Gazza, Hugh Grant, paparazzi,
TOP TORIES USED ME AS THEIR SEX TOY
and Union-jackquerie as its most basic
in shadowy, murmurous citadels like this
beside Whistler's Thames.
Behind the rage there is an order, though, as Mahon tries, from his observation dug-out, his "Axel's Castle" overlooking the world, to reason with the declining value of the Capitol Art. The Yellow Book lambasts current fakery, celebrates the brave hearts of the past and what remains for the solitary ones, in Yeatsian afterglow:
I climb as directed to our proper dark,
five flights without a lift up to the old
gloom we used to love, and the old cold.
Head in the clouds but tired of verse, I fold
away my wind-harp and my dejection odes
and mute the volume on the familiar phone
(`. . . leave your number; speak after the tone')
to concentrate on pipe-dreams and smoke-clouds.
Mahon is a priceless poet. He refuses to lapse into the requisite consolations of so much contemporary poetry while being able to write eloquently of loss, ironically of nostalgia, and robustly of his writing self:
. . . soap-bubbles foam in a drainpipe and life begins.
I dreamed last night of a blue Cycladic dawn,
a lone figure pointing to the horizon,
against the white islands shouting, `Come on; come on!'
The Yellow Book marries different poetic strains from Mahon's earlier work: the verse letters which stretch back to "Beyond Howth Head" and "The Sea in Winter"; the "big" stanzas retuned as ecologues; the Wallace Stevens verbal fabrication shop, the rhetorician's hit-list ("we nod to you from the pastiche paradise of the post-modern"), the roving translator and the dinky imagination at play among the flotsam and jetsam:
On winter evenings, as the cars flash by,
what hides in there in the kingdom of mould and bark?
Beyond the iron railings and the little gate
only a worm stirs, and dead leaves conflate
in a dried-up fountain crisp-packet and matchbox
(Plato compares a fountain to a flute);
dead leaves up here too, lamplight night and day.
This, as they say, is the business: an essential buy.
Gerald Dawe's collections of poems include Heart of Hearts; The Rest is History, will be published next year