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Poem of the Week: “How to Live” by Derek Mahon
…days are more fun than the years which pass us by while we discuss them. Act with zest one day at a time, and never mind the rest. –Derek Mahon, The Hunt by Night (1982)…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Noon at St. Michael’s” by Derek Mahon
…advanced of those we know. While you sit on your sun-porch in Connecticut re-reading Yeats in a feminist light, I am there with you. –Derek Mahon, from The Hudson Letter (1996)…
Continue ReadingPoetry for Samhain: “The Andean Flute” by Derek Mahon
…nt cry for warmth and food That moves him. Acting out an ancient theme, He dances to that music in the wood. Who said the banished gods were gone for good? –Derek Mahon, from The Hunt by Night (1982) Follow us on Twitter for more #samhainsongs….
Continue ReadingDerek Mahon
Derek Mahon was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1941 and was educated at Trinity College in Dublin and at the Sorbonne in Paris. Wake Forest published three of his volumes: The Hunt by Night (1982, redesigned in 1995), The Hudson Letter (1996), and The Yellow Book (1998), as well as his translation of Philippe Jaccottet’s Selected Poems in 1988. He has written many volumes of poetry, translations, and plays, and edited The Penguin Book of C…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “The Globe in Carolina” by Derek Mahon
…turning, hugs Its silence, while the lightning bugs Are quiet beneath the open window, Listening to that lonesome whistle blow. –Derek Mahon, from The Shack (2015)…
Continue ReadingJohn McAuliffe in Conversation with Conor O’Callaghan
…while still bearing the theme in mind. And, yes, that’s a terrific and apt Mahon line, with a sense of potential and limit, a feeling that chimes with “The Hundred Towns” and a lot else in Next Door. A couple of other points of contact with Mahon whose tone and phrasing are still a model to me: I must have had his London poems in view as well in “The Hundred Towns”—I’m thinking of his Kensington poems, more than the brilliant and more recent Coler…
Continue ReadingSelected Poems | Philippe Jaccottet
…e. Jaccottet’s work has now developed steadily over nearly four decades as Derek Mahon points out in his introductory essay. In themes and form it will not seem alien to English language readers, yet Jaccottet’s voice is his own. The sensuous modulations of imagery, harmony, and mood are strangely moving and haunt the imagination. About the poet: Born in Moudon, Switzerland in 1925, Philippe Jaccottet is one of the most prominent figures of the im…
Continue ReadingCollected Poems | Louis MacNeice
…f vigorous support from Irish writers like Edna Longley, Paul Muldoon, and Derek Mahon. MacNeice’s Collected Poems has finally been published in the United States, where readers will now have a chance to approach this underestimated writer on his own terms. . . . What we most want, MacNeice suggests, is simply to ‘know each other better,’ but that possibility depends on laboring blindly through darkness. With the publication of Collected Poems, Ma…
Continue ReadingThe Hudson Letter
…rk 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…
Continue ReadingRadio Signals: An interview with Leontia Flynn
…Seamus Heaney, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Michael Longley, Eavan Boland, Derek Mahon, to name a few. Who would you consider to be your greatest poetic influences? Medbh McGuckian’s debut and early books were game-changing-ly brilliant and it always bothered me that she wasn’t quite recognized the way her postmodern male contemporaries were. Because the ideas she played with involved gender—and motherhood indeed—she was often read back towards more con…
Continue ReadingHarry Clifton
…es in Literature and the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1981. Harry Clifton served as the fifth Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2010–2013. He is a member of Aosdána, the Irish artists’ association. Praise for Harry Clifton Harry Clifton is “among the poets who matter.” – Derek Mahon “Secular Eden is a magisterial book, one that should re-introduce Clifton to a wide audience.” – Kenyon Review The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass is a “complex, evocative…
Continue ReadingSelected Poems | Louis MacNeice
…of Irish poets, especially those from Northern Ireland like Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon, because of his lyrically nuanced considerations of international as well as national issues. Born and raised in Northern Ireland, and educated in England where he resided for much of his adult life, MacNeice answered a need in these poets for a perspective that made the local have larger political significance. He also offered…
Continue ReadingPharaoh’s Daughter
…Hartnett, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, Tom MacIntyre, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and George O’Brien Reviews “[T]he branching-out, or shape-shifting, from Gaelic myth or folk-song to some less romantic or quirkier emblem of the present, is a constant resource of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry; and it’s one of the ways she has rescued the Irish language from its association with Gaelic League…
Continue ReadingThe New North: Contemporary Poetry from Northern Ireland
…Leontia Flynn, and Nick Laird, as well as classic poems by Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, and Michael Longley. Reviews Wake Forest University Press continues its impressive dedication to Irish poetry . . . with The New North. . . . [T]he poems and poets offer an insightful, lyrical look into the psyche of 21st-century Northern Ireland.” – Irish America Magazine “American-born editor Chris Agee, who has l…
Continue ReadingLouis MacNeice: Collected Poems NY Times Book Review
…to support from other Irish writers such as Edna Longley, Paul Muldoon and Derek Mahon. Orr provides an intimate glance into MacNeice’s melancholic childhood, a theme that permeates much of his work. He also praises MacNeice’s versatility via style and content, thoughtfully complimenting MacNeice’s beauty in repetition and refrain. There is a sense of circularity to MacNeice’s work, always harkening back from whence it came. It is in this traditio…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Dans l’étendue/In the distance” by Philippe Jaccottet
…istance nothing but shimmering peaks Nothing but ardent glances interweaving Blackbirds and doves –Philippe Jaccottet, translated by Derek Mahon, from Selected Poems (1988)…
Continue ReadingJohn Montague
…st ten volumes, and a new selection of his poetry, A Spell to Bless the Silence (2018). Montague died on December 10, 2016, at the age of 87. Praise for John Montague “The best Irish poet of his generation.” – Derek Mahon “[H]e is a world-class poet, one of that extraordinary group — perhaps a dozen? — who illuminate our lives, not just for now, but for as long as words have meaning.” – Carolyn Kizer…
Continue ReadingScapegoat and Other Poems
…st,” “Laganside,” and “In the Shadow of the Mournes,” Gillis reveals, like Derek Mahon and Louis MacNeice before him, his ability to plumb the depths of the complicated society of Northern Ireland. In the title poem, Gillis captures the religious and political implications of a society that too long has looked to find a scapegoat for its woes. From his first published poem, “The Ulster Way,” he has turned social pressures back upon the self, explo…
Continue ReadingGone Self Storm
…mal necessity, Clifton has all three—he is one of the poets who matter.” – Derek Mahon “These poems…cut through the mist, like a fog lamp, with their own sharp-edged clarities… There is ambition here.” – Benjamin Keatinge “Much like Joyce, he’s one of these people who writes about Ireland with the great insight that only a sense of self-exile can bring.” – Jessica Traynor, RTÉ Radio 1’s Arena, on Herod’s Dispensations (Irish Poetry books of 2019)…
Continue ReadingRemembering Gerard Fanning
…pulling out clippings from the Irish Times of new poems by his hero, Derek Mahon. Gerard was always too modest about his own poems, the best of which are head-and-shoulders above the crowd. There is, in his work, a Mahonish ache for the crepuscular, the derelict, the past. But in addition to that there is a boyish charm and wit and secrecy that is all his own. He worked as a civil servant, and his best poems play with the persona of the faceless f…
Continue ReadingThe Shack: Irish Poets in the Foothills and Mountains of the Blue Ridge
…e, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Conor O’Callaghan, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon. With lush watercolors by Kenneth Frazelle and an eighteenth-century painting of Old Salem by Christian Daniel Welfare. A handmade, limited-edition broadside of the title poem “The Shack” by Michael Longley was created on the occasion of the launch of this book. Reviews “. . . Wake Forest University Press has produced a collection of poems, prose, and artwork th…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “It’s easy to talk, and writing words on the page” by Philippe Jaccottet
…lie, or worse: a craven insult to grief or a waste of the little time and energy at our disposal. –Philippe Jaccottet, translated by Derek Mahon, from Selected Poems (1988)…
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