{"id":199,"date":"2009-02-10T21:13:23","date_gmt":"2009-02-10T21:13:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=199"},"modified":"2014-02-11T23:00:50","modified_gmt":"2014-02-11T23:00:50","slug":"rage-for-order-derek-mahon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=199","title":{"rendered":"Rage for Order: Derek Mahon"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve just opened a package from Amazon in the kitchen and taken out Derek Mahon\u2019s Life on Earth<\/em>. The first poem I glanced at was \u201cPaolo and Lighea\u201d. It\u2019s a little six-liner with a wry throwaway feel, a slight piece in a way, but it gave me an instant shock of pleasure and a strong sense of coming home which contrasted quite markedly with the kind of pleasure I\u2019ve had from other very good new books of poetry I\u2019ve read recently. Admittedly, I\u2019ve been reading \u00a0<\/span>Mahon for many years now and I\u2019m sure that a great deal of the sensation I\u2019m talking about came from reliving familiar themes braided together in new ways, and from hearing different notes sounded by a loved and familiar voice. However, I think another element is the sureness of touch with which Mahon can give a feeling of graceful rightness and finality of form to even apparently casual utterances. It\u2019s the element I miss in books like Fiona Sampson\u2019s Common Prayer<\/em> and Sarah Maguire\u2019s The Pomegranates of Kandahar<\/em>, full as they are of brilliant images and beautiful phrases. I\u2019m sure it\u2019s partly that I\u2019m just not familiar enough with these poets\u2019 voices or attuned enough to their cadences to appreciate the shaping of their poems \u00a0<\/span>as much as I\u2019ll come to on further readings. However, I do think that what Michael Longley and Derek Mahon share is an extraordinary perfectionist integrity and sureness of touch in working at their poems until they have achieved a sense of finality and inevitability, without <\/em>its feeling as if the form is an imposed or constraining element. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What a gift this ability to combine form with openness to reality is! I think of all the haiku I\u2019ve read that seem slight, trivial and artificial, and then I think of the lovely \u201cBasho in Kinsale\u201d sequence from Harbour Lights<\/em>, with all its firmly shaped but unforced wit and humour, its shifting emotion and physical evocativeness. \u00a0<\/span>In Mahon\u2019s case the reconciliation seems to emerge from a stringent dialectic between commitment to the formal and linguistic perfecting of expression and scepticism about poetry\u2019s ability to do justice to reality, whether of the inner or outer kind. Both the commitment and the self-mocking scepticism are evident in the last lines of \u201cThe Mayo Tao\u201d:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I have been working for years<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>on a four line poem<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>about the life of a leaf.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>I think it may come out right this winter.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

They are expressed more self-excoriatingly, with multiple despairing ironies and ambiguities, in \u201cRage for Order\u201d, when he talks about the poet fine-tuning his art as \u201cindulging \/ his wretched rage for order\u201d and poetry itself as \u201can eddy of semantic scruple \/ in an unstructurable sea\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve just opened a package from Amazon in the kitchen and taken out Derek Mahon\u2019s Life on Earth. The first poem I glanced at was \u201cPaolo and Lighea\u201d. It\u2019s a little six-liner with a wry throwaway feel, a slight piece in a way, but it gave me an instant shock of pleasure and a strong […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-derek-mahon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1444,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions\/1444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}