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Derek Mahon (born 1941) is an Irish poet. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but later studied at Trinity College, Dublin. He moved to London in 1970.

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 "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.

Contents 1 Works 1.1 Poetry 1.2 Translations 1.3 Prose 2 External links

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

Works

Poetry

• Night-Crossing. Oxford University Press, 1968
• Lives. OUP,1972.
• The Snow Party. OUP, 1975.
• Poems 1962-1978. OUP, 1979.
• Courtyards in Delft. OUP, 1981.
• The Hunt By Night. OUP, 1982.
• Antarctica Gallery Press, 1985.
• Selected Poems. Gallery Press, 1990.
• Selected Poems. Viking, 1991.
• The Hudson Letter. Gallery Press, 1995.
• The Yellow Book. Gallery Press, 1997.
• Collected Poems. Gallery Press, 1999.

Translations

• The Chimeras (a version of Les Chimères, by Nerval). Gallery Press, 1982.
• High Time (a version of Molière's A School for Husbands). Gallery Press, 1985.
• The Selected Poems of Philippe Jaccottet. Viking, 1988.
• The Bacchae of Euripedes, and Racine's Phaedra. Gallery Press, 1996.
• Birds (a version of Oiseaux, by Saint-John Perse). 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.

Prose

• Journalism: selected prose, 1970-1995. Ed. Terence Brown. Gallery Press, 1996.

External links

• "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.

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