{"id":2152,"date":"2019-05-17T11:34:02","date_gmt":"2019-05-17T11:34:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2152"},"modified":"2019-05-17T11:34:02","modified_gmt":"2019-05-17T11:34:02","slug":"derek-mahon-against-the-clock-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2152","title":{"rendered":"Derek Mahon, Against the Clock – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Against the Clock<\/em>, by Derek Mahon. Gallery Press. 80 pp. \u20ac11.95<\/p>\n

Life on Earth<\/em> is my favourite among Mahon\u2019s later collections. Nothing in Against the Clock<\/em> seems to me as electrifying as that volume\u2019s \u201cHomage to Gaia\u201d, but this too is a remarkably rich work by a mature master.<\/p>\n

In the title poem, Mahon is seen spurring himself to write hard and as well as he can against the deadline of death. He describes how he encourages himself to take example from great poets who, whatever their faults in life and art, kept going to the end as writers. Then he describes how when he loses heart they round on him, telling him that however worthless what he\u2019s doing may be, it\u2019s what he\u2019s here for. This complex, layered poem harbours many ambiguities of feeling, including an ambivalence that reaches back pretty well throughout Mahon\u2019s career: the struggle between dedication to poetry and doubt about its ultimate value. What\u2019s remarkable, though, is how the poem combines subtlety and complication with a powerful sense of spontaneous speech driving to a forceful conclusion. The apparent spontaneity depends on virtuoso artifice, the sheer fluency with which the author inhabits stanza and metre, riding their patterns like a surfer riding waves, using their energy to propel what Yeats called \u201ca natural momentum in the syntax\u201d. As Yeats pointed out, such a momentum is more important than \u201cwords in common use\u201d for creating the impression of passionate speech, allowing the poem to carry any amount of heightened language without losing power or conviction. So Mahon can combine the gutsy, down-to-earth energies of slang and elliptical speech with the precision and imaginative reach of a more elevated style. Moreover, steeped in the poetry of different ages and languages as he is, he combines colloquial force with the intricate interplay of perspectives invoked by allusion. In this poem most references are forthright and simple, sometimes reinforced by brief explanatory glosses. However, the reference to \u201cthe old faces\u201d brilliantly and unobtrusively makes Mahon\u2019s poem spark against Yeats\u2019 \u201cThe New Faces\u201d, and does so to complex imaginative effect, as anyone putting the two together will see.<\/p>\n

\u201cAgainst the Clock\u201d expresses harsh resignation and resolve. In contrast, \u201cOlympia\u201d is a minor miracle of harmony and grace, wittily imagining the poet\u2019s battered typewriter as muse, dancing partner and co-creator. Shifting tones blend in a seamless dance through a complex invented stanza form. Lightly sounded as they are, they evoke discordant impulses and energies reaching back through Mahon\u2019s career but do so in a way that subdues them to the grace of the whole. At the forefront of our minds is the liberating play of fantasy that is such a frequent feature of Mahon\u2019s verse. The opening draws us into the hush of an erotic encounter tense with anticipated pleasure:<\/p>\n

We commune, she
\nand I, in silent privacy,
\nribbon and paper glimmering …<\/p>\n

When communion becomes dance the metre suggests both the clattering of typewriter keys and the movement of the dancers\u2019 feet, while the surges, checks and whirls of sentences round phrase and line endings suggest the evolution of the dance as a whole. Step by step we\u2019re led from picturing the partners as ageless lovers absorbed in each other and the promise of the moment to seeing them as stiff-jointed elders whose pleasure depends on the vistas of faded experience behind them and the sense of recapturing at least an illusion of past glories:<\/p>\n

On we go<\/p>\n

clickety-click
\n(each imprint an antique
\never so slightly out of the true as if
\nhandwritten, as if with its own personal life
\nstretching back to a past
\nlost in the mist,<\/p>\n

old dust and fluff
\nhiding with other stuff
\nin the dark places), page after rackety page,
\ntwo crotchety relics of a previous age
\njazzing it up again as
\nin the great days.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a beautiful shimmering between rueful self-deprecation and suggestions of the special value of what is old and has its own personal life, or between the squalid associations of dust, fluff and stuff and the repeated suggestion in Mahon that just such dark corners are the hiding places of creative power.\u00a0 The lightness of touch owes much to another of Mahon\u2019s favoured devices, the indefinite floating of tonalities and suggestions by use of the counterfactual \u201cas if\u201d.<\/p>\n

Self-deprecating or harshly self-dismissive as he can be, Mahon has an unembarrassed sense of belonging to the great tradition of poetry. Without naming themselves as such, some of these poems are clearly Odes, like \u201cA Full Moon in May\u201d, which combines an elaborate metrical form with direct address to the subject \u2013 the moon, in traditional mythological guises \u2013 to give a simultaneous sense of heightened formality and overflowing passion, fusing lyrical feeling with wider reflection. Both his use of myth and his devotion to regular form seem to reflect a sense of the poem as not merely a personal utterance but both a kind of ceremony and the discharge of a collective obligation, speaking on behalf of a wider community. Such an attitude is explicit in the end of \u201cNinth Wave\u201d:<\/p>\n

Haunted by death, lost love, a nightmare past,
\nindictments of ourselves, what should we do
\nwith these inheritances but write them through
\nand sing the praises of our only nurse
\nin gratitudes of prose and verse?<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Patricia Oxley for her permission to post this review, which originally appeared in Acumen 93.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Against the Clock, by Derek Mahon. Gallery Press. 80 pp. \u20ac11.95 Life on Earth is my favourite among Mahon\u2019s later collections. Nothing in Against the Clock seems to me as electrifying as that volume\u2019s \u201cHomage to Gaia\u201d, but this too is a remarkably rich work by a mature master. In the title poem, Mahon is […]<\/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-2152","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\/2152"}],"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=2152"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2154,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152\/revisions\/2154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}