Derek Mahon

Mahon was born 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.

At Inst he encountered fellow students who shared his interest in literature and poetry. The school produced a magazine to 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.

Mahon pursued third level studies at Trinity College, Dublin 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 currently lives in Kinsale, Co. 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.[1]

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.’[2]

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 has often written 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 has been interested in 17th century Dutch and Flemish art.

• Enniss, Stephen (2014) After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon, Gill & Macmillan
• Haughton, Hugh (2007) The Poetry of Derek Mahon, Oxford University Press

• List of Northern Irish writers

• 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

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Derek Mahon

• Eamonn Grennan (Spring 2000). "Derek Mahon, The Art of Poetry No. 82". The Paris Review.
• 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 1963-1988: Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University: Letters to Louis Asekoff, 1963-1988