The Hudson Letter
$8.95 – $14.95
Mahon writes from lower Manhattan, addressing, in ramble or vigil, his absent lover, his children in London, Auden, Yeats’s father, and other cosmic vagrants, “clutching our bits and pieces, arrogant in dereliction.” In the eighteen sections of “The Hudson Letter,” the gabble of a dockside bar, voices of a recycled Sappho and of an Irish immigrant girl reassuring her mother in Inishannon, and the midwinter, all-night sounds of the City intersperse with the voice of the poet—lively, witty, poignant, elegiac, humane, and thoroughly human. “The Hudson Letter” is prefaced by four new poems in different voices.
Reviews
“. . . something fresh and virtually unprecedented in modern Irish poetry: a work of art that is at once a love letter and a dream of reconciliation, a diary of a trauma and a vision of restoration.”
– Ben Howard, Sewanee Review
“From the first page of Derek Mahon’s new collection of poems we know that we are back in the hands of a master.”
– Peggy O’Brien, The Irish Times
Description
Mahon writes from lower Manhattan, addressing, in ramble or vigil, his absent lover, his children in London, Auden, Yeats’s father, and other cosmic vagrants, “clutching our bits and pieces, arrogant in dereliction.” In the eighteen sections of “The Hudson Letter,” the gabble of a dockside bar, voices of a recycled Sappho and of an Irish immigrant girl reassuring her mother in Inishannon, and the midwinter, all-night sounds of the City intersperse with the voice of the poet—lively, witty, poignant, elegiac, humane, and thoroughly human. “The Hudson Letter” is prefaced by four new poems in different voices.
Reviews
“. . . something fresh and virtually unprecedented in modern Irish poetry: a work of art that is at once a love letter and a dream of reconciliation, a diary of a trauma and a vision of restoration.”
– Ben Howard, Sewanee Review
“From the first page of Derek Mahon’s new collection of poems we know that we are back in the hands of a master.”
– Peggy O’Brien, The Irish Times
Additional information
| Publication date: | 1996 |
|---|---|
| Pages: | 64 |
| Binding: |
