Derek Mahon

for John Minihan

Nous nous aimerons tous et nos enfants riront De la légende noire où pleure un solitaire.

Paul Eluard

The sort of snailmail that can take a week but suits my method, pre-informatique, I write this from the St Louis, rm 14 – or type it, rather, on the old machine, a portable, that I take when I migrate in ‘the run-up to Christmas’. Here I sit...

On the first day of principal photography they sit outside at a St Germain café with a coffee pot between them on a round table of chequered oilcloth red and grey. The hand-held camera looks for natural light, mikes pick up traffic and incidental sound. A mid-week noon and the hot bridges sweat; from ice buckets, from windows, watches, knives life flashes back at them their glittering...

(Ovid, Metamorphoses, X, 243-277)

... Pygmalion watched these women, hard- featured and cynical, as they led their shameful lives and, sickened by the wickedness so generously given to their sex, he lived alone without a wife to call his own. Meanwhile, ingeniously, he wrought a maiden out of ivory, one lovelier than any woman born, and with this shape he fell in love. Alive, she seemed, and...

Tonight, their simple church grown glamorous, The proud parishioners of the outlying parts Lift up their hymn-books and their hearts To please the outside-broadcast cameras. The darkness deepens; day draws to a close; A well-bred sixth-former yawns with her nose.

Outside, the hymn dies among rocks and dunes. Conflicting rhythms of the incurious sea, Not even contemptuous of these tiny tunes,...

Why Brownlee left is paul Muldoon’s third book of poems, and his most interesting so far. Whereas, in the earlier books, he didn’t do a great deal more than exercise the quirky, oblique lyricism which has become his personal signature, he puts it here to the service of an idea, or complex of ideas, which constitutes a private poetry of departure. An ‘inner émigré’, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, he proposes for himself, for his father, for a childhood neighbour, real or imagined disappearing acts. This is, from one point of view, another example of the time-honoured Irish instinct to get out (generally accompanied by an obsession with the abandoned isle); and, indeed, there is the merest hint of political exasperation in one or two poems. Or perhaps ‘exasperation’ is too positive, too recognisable an emotion to ascribe to Muldoon, whose characteristic posture is one of child-like wonder in the face of multiple possibility. There is no ‘plague on both your houses’ here, but a reticence born of an inability to take sides, as in ‘The Boundary Commission’, which I quote in full: