Literary Criticism: The Poetry of Derek Mahon By Hugh Haughton Oxford University Press, 402pp. £30Aside from reviews and some fugitive lectures and essays, as well as a volume of essays published in 2002, the poetry of Derek Mahon has received - given his by now, by common consensus, major status - surprisingly little attention.
This unsatisfactory state of things may soon change, thanks to the richly compendious critical-cum-biographical opening up of the poems performed by Hugh Haughton in this first book-length study of the poet's work. For Haughton's extended account - generous, intelligent, lucidly written, bright and brimming with insights and information - should serve as the indispensable ground and seed-bed for future critical and biographical engagements with an ongoing life's work of rare value and distinction. While its critical strategy of chronologically ordered close reading makes some repetitiveness unavoidable, this only underscores the fact that the book should also be kept as an essential "companion guide" to Mahon's various poetry collections: having read through any one of them, a reading of the relevant pages in Haughton will allow one to go back and re-read the poems with an enriched sense of how they work, what they mean, where they fit, what they're at.
Given Mahon's determined privacy on one hand, his abundance of inter-textual and cultural reference on another, and on yet another his compulsive revisions of his own poems - which undergo (sometimes controversial) sea-changes or complete excision as they move from their manuscript drafts through magazine appearance through various Selected Poems and finally into a stripped-down, ascetically slim Collected Poems (published in 1999) - Haughton's can have been no easy task. Yet his careful weaving together of life and work, his demonstration on page after page of refined but always sensible close reading, his use of secondary material to illuminate not only the poems themselves but the life in its personal, historical, political and cultural contexts, have all been accomplished with a fertile mixture of patience, grace and understanding.
Whether dealing with the poet's chosen migrations to England or North America, with his regular European peregrinations, with his variously impermanent jobs, with his alcoholism or broken marriage, Haughton's treatment - unafraid to look into dark corners, and willing to offer negative as well as positive responses to a poem, or comment critically on the poet's complex, sometimes curmudgeonly persona - everywhere reveals how Mahon wrestles with the scattered, unsettling elements of his own life and the larger chaotic life of late-20th-century western culture (especially Irish, English, American) and shapes them into enduring figures of "redemptive art".
Proceeding from book to book, and within each book isolating and reading individual poems to instructive effect, Haughton repeatedly illustrates how issues such as home and homelessness, private life and political reality, as well as motifs such as those of the journey, of domestic, earthly, and cosmic spaces recur, all registering Mahon's "numinous materialism". But his close readings also reveal how, beyond these material issues, the preoccupation with form itself is a constant - the pressure of form pushing back against the stresses of actuality, these two forces in a perpetually see-sawing, uneasy, often explicit dialogue with each other. And, throughout, the critic manages to show that, although Mahon has not actually lived in Northern Ireland for any great length of time since leaving it in 1960 for Dublin and Trinity, that the North and his complex web of feelings about it informs in both direct and quasi-allegorical ways almost everything he writes. Meditations on local political reality, that is, incubated by his experience of the home place, Belfast, form a hard core for the widening circles of implication regarding the larger world, in poems that hold, as Haughton shows - beyond intimate critiques of Tiger Ireland - their own "panoptic" apocalyptic glow.
One of the things I am most in awe of when reading Mahon is the sheer accumulation of cultural references he seems capable of. He performs like a magnet in a field of iron filings, imaginatively shaping the constituent particles of 20th- and now 21st-century culture - high- as well as middle- and lowbrow - into readable, beautifully articulated shapes, in manners that range from sardonic exuberance to Romantic rapture, satirical rage to jaunty humour, secular-mystical, to heartbreakingly elegiac. Thanks to Haughton (who makes excellent use of the Mahon archive at Emory University) we can now not only get a firm grasp on the meaning of such jostling and jagged references, but see how such a tendency - this alert cosmopolitan consciousness - forms a steady if evolving element in the work, as alive, if in a very different way, in a lyric like An Image from Beckett as it is in an early epistolary poem like Beyond Howth Head or in the mordant, more global analyses that determine those longer, later sequences, The Hudson Letter and The Yellow Book.
OTHER THINGS I most value Mahon for - which in truth take precedence even over this daunting allusive variety - are his rhythmic buoyancy, metrical skill, quicksilver diction, epigrammatic wit, "vernacular zest" and sheer lyrical lightness of touch, the way these carry the specific gravity, phrase after memorably forged phrase, of every poem. Whether in the early volumes, Night Crossing, Lives, or The Hunt By Night, or restored and enriched in his most recent collection, it is this quality of lyric fine-tuning (hence all those revisions) that persuades my ear, and which - from the start, way back in the 1960s - persuaded me and the rest of his readers of the presence of a remarkable talent. Hugh Haughton's achievement in The Poetry of Derek Mahon lies in the detail with which he shows the originating elements from which that talent - with its conviction "that the real is inexhaustible" - developed, consistently evolving and enlarging its authority. And it lies also in the controlling critical design with which Haughton illuminates those forces of choice and circumstance which impelled this talent through its various stages, steering the often-nomadic poet and "haunted critical intelligence" - now in his own chosen haven, maybe, in Kinsale - to unabated, always interconnected, imaginative productivity, on clear view in the aptly named latest volume, Harbour Lights.
YEARS (AND YEARS) ago, when Mahon was either visiting or living in New York, I remember a trip we made together to the Cloisters museum, perched high above the Hudson River, at the edge of the raw boulevards of the Bronx. A sunny day, maybe spring. Finished with the museum, with its great collection of medieval artifacts, we stood by a low wall and looked out over the river. Mahon decided this was the right time to recite a poem we both loved: Paul Goodman's The Lordly Hudson. Which he did (was he standing on the wall?), declaiming it to the river itself in its slow deep movement towards the ports of New Jersey and Manhattan: "Driver, what stream is this, I asked, well knowing/ It was our lordly Hudson, hardly flowing/ Under its green-grown banks . . ." and so on. A lovely poem, and the "young Irish poet" - in transit, or resident alien - gave it vox. Among many mental snapshots, I keep this one as a speaking image: the poet's back to all that art and all that difficult daily life of the American city, his face turned to the huge, endlessly flowing stream - Heraclitean emblem of history and its burdens - his Irish, Northern-inflected voice rising and falling between them. And, at the end of it all, to deflate the arty affectation of the scene and return to "life", Mahon turning and saying, in his put-on Dublin accent, "There y'are!", as we headed off for a drink.
Hugh Haughton's welcome, admirably achieved book shows in depth and breadth - as this memory-flash might suggest in little - how the poetry of Derek Mahon is an extended, continuous, continually amplifying engagement with the many-layered nature of our human life. And is - through his art, his "encoded mysteries of the human heart", his willingness to draw some sort of conscious, sceptical, yet defiant order from the tangle of experience - an enriching of it.
Eamon Grennan's most recent collections are The Quick of It and Out of Breath