Derek Mahon - Biography, Style, Bibliography

Poet, born in Belfast, NE Northern Ireland, UK. He was educated at Belfast Institute and Trinity College, Dublin, and was a teacher before turning to journalism and other writing. Drawn to squalid landscapes and desperate situations, his acknowledged influences are Louis MacNeice and W H Auden. Twelve Poems was published in 1965, since when there have been a number of others, including The Hunt by Night (1982), A Kensington Notebook (1984), The Yellow Book (1997), and Collected Poems (1999).

Derek Mahon (born 23 November 1941) is an Irish poet.

Biography

Mahon was born the only child of Ulster Protestant working class parents. The school produced a magazine to which Mahon produced some of his early poems.

Mahon pursued third level studies at Trinity College Dublin where he formed many friendships with writers such as Michael Longley, Eavan Boland and Brendan Kennelly.

After leaving the Sorbonne in 1966 he worked his way through Canada and the United States.

Style

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. 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.

Mahon has been cited as a major influence by a number of Irish poets, including Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and Eamon Grennan.

Bibliography

Poetry

Night-Crossing. Oxford University Press, 1968 Lives. OUP,1972. Antarctica Gallery Press, 1985. Selected Poems. Gallery Press, 1990. The Yaddo Letter. Gallery Press, 1992. The Hudson Letter. Gallery Press, 1995. The Yellow Book. Gallery Press, 1997. Collected Poems. Gallery Press, 1999. Harbour Lights. Gallery Press, 2005. Gallery Press, 1982. Gallery Press, 1985. The Selected Poems of Philippe Jaccottet. Viking, 1988. The Bacchae of Euripedes, and Racine's Phaedra. Gallery Press, 1996. Gallery Press, 2002. Cyrano de Bergerac. (A version of the play by Edmond Rostand.) Gallery Press, 2004. Oedipus (A conflation of Sophocles' Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus.) Gallery Press, 2005. Adaptations (A collection of versions, rather than translations proper, from poets such as Pasolini, Juvenal, Bertolt Brecht, Valery, Baudelaire, Rilke, and Nuala ni Dhomhnaill.) Gallery Press, 2006. Gallery Press, 1996.