Perish the thought

John Redmond

• Selected Poems by Derek Mahon
  Penguin, 213 pp, £9.99, November 2000, ISBN 0 14 118233 4

In his undergraduate days at Trinity College Dublin in the early 1960s, Derek Mahon cast a spell over his contemporaries, as he would cast a spell over his early readers. He had wit, taste and a literary knowledge beyond his years; his distinctiveness as a Belfast poet was crucially accentuated by his study of French literature, which Irish poets had been slow to explore. Fellow students who are now also famous poets have recorded how intimidating his presence, and poems, could be. ‘I was taken aback by the sheer verve of his idiom,’ Eavan Boland writes, ‘the attack of his syntax, his brat-pack stance as poète maudit.’ Michael Longley ‘felt overwhelmed and wanted to withdraw to a safe distance’. It was obvious that, as a young poet, he dominated the university scene. It was not so obvious that the university would dominate him.

Of the Northern Irish poets who emerged in the 1960s, Mahon was the most technically gifted. The early poems show a mesmerising assurance immediately established, for example, in the opening of ‘Early Morning’, the first section of the sequence ‘Breton Walks’:

No doubt the creation was something like this –
A cold day breaking on silent stones,
Slower than time, spectacular only in size.