A response from Kinsale ...

I had received - a postcard from Derek Mahon from Kinsale quite a few weeks back, which I was absolutely delighted to receive - wishing me good luck with my Research Project and letting me know that his biographer had just released a book at the end of last year - 2014.  Unfortunately I have tried to upload this quite a few times without success, hopefully this time ...

Kinsale, Co Cork - with its brightly coloured buildings, I am hoping to visit over Easter.

After the Titanic A Life of Derek Mahon

After the Titanic A Life of Derek Mahon by Stephen Enniss arrived today and it makes an amazing read.  Stephen Enniss is a distinguished librarian and archivist who goes through the 'Battlefield of Mahon's life in this biography', according to McCarthy.  He believes that 'Enniss is uniquely placed to check through the wreckage of most Irish poetry.'

According to McCarthy 'Derek Mahon is a genius of a poet. Instinctively lyrical like his true soul-mates Van Morrison and Louis MacNeice, his politics is unexpectedly Irish. One would have thought that like our number one golfer, Rory, he would feel more British than Irish, but he has deflected both the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and an OBE from Tony Blair’s government. “Northern Ireland is sick unto death, perhaps because at a deep level it knows it shouldn’t exist,” he said to Paul Durcan in a very early Magill interview, and in preparation for an American reading, he warned his publisher that he was not to be introduced as an Ulster poet but ‘Irish, please.’  (Cited in http://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/artsfilmtv/books/life-of-poet-is-work-in-progress-290644.html.  Accessed 11th February 2015).

A Family Connection

My grandmother Mary Mahon and Derek's father Norman Mahon were brother and sister.  Today I have written a letter to Derek to see if my mother (who is Derek's cousin) and I could travel to his home in Kinsale to meet with him to discuss my research project that I intend to write on his life and works.  My mother and her family have met up with Derek at his home in Kinsale on a few occasions when they head down to the Jazz Festival in Cork.

An Short Introduction to Derek Mahon - Poet

Welcome to my Blog about the life and works of Derek Mahon.

Derek Mahon was born in Belfast in 1941 and his poem 'A Disused Shed in Co, Wexford', from his collection of poems The Snow Party, has been described as the single most beautiful poem written by an Irish poet since the death of Yeats.

The Actor Stephen Rea's Favourite Poem 'A disused shed in County Wexford'

The actor - Stephen Rea who reads his favourite poem
'A disused shed in County Wexford' by Derek Mahon

 

 

Reading the Future

"Who are the Irish writers working today who will be read in one hundred year's time?" 

That was the question that RTE put to a panel of scholars, editors and others. The result was a list of writers, each of whom will have a dialogue with Mike Murphy for a television and radio series "reading the future". This work includes an incisive introduction by Declan Kiberd, consulting editor to the RTE series and chairman of the selection panel. There will also be biographical notes on each writer and a chronology of Irish literature covering the period in which the selected writers have been working. The result is an insight into the lives and creative minds of 12 great writers such as Derek Mahon; John Banville; Marina Carr; Brian Friel; Seamus Heaney; Thomas Kinsella; Michael Longley; John McGahern; Tom Murphy; Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill; Edna O'Brien; and William Trevor.

In 2000 Mike Murphy published 'Reading the Future' and accordingly Murphy has concurred that 'Mahon has produced a substantial body of literary criticism and journalism, and he is a distinguished translator and adapter of poetry and plays'.  To discuss his work Murphy was joined by the poet Vona Groarke, critic Hugh Haughton and poet and lecturer Gerald Dawe. When asked 'Can you place Mahon as a writer at the beginning of the twenty-first century?', Haughton argued that 'its always hard to place people.  Derek is wonderful about place and about the problem of historical placing.  He is one of the writers who has changed the course of Irish poetry.  He has opened up a new subject matter, written a new kind of poem, in touch with modernity in a way Irish poetry wasn't when he began writing in the sixties.  He is a poet who is always conscious of wider cultural forces'.