An Interview in February 2014

I found this documentary on Youtube made by Rebecca Halliday.  It shows Derek Mahon retracing his steps from childhood along Salisbury Avenue on the Antrim Road to his days at the The Royal Belfast Academical Institute in Belfast.  He then travels to Trinity College, to relive his undergraduate days and then to London, where he lived for fifteen years.  Finally Derek travels to 45 Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin, where he was very content for many years, before finally making Kinsale his home at The Grove.

It is a wonderful documentary discussing his influences such as Coleridge, where Derek visits where Coleridge lived in London, as well as Esra Pound, who lived at 16 Kensington Church Walk, a short distance from Derek's Observatory Gardens home in Kensington.

Red Sails - Derek Mahon

After cancelling my Amazon Prime this morning £79 for a year, I then decide to buy this new book of essays and memoir, published in October last year!  The Irish Studies Library in Armagh did have this book and I took quite a few pictures of it with my iPhone, but there is nothing like actually reading a book (a paperback rather than on a screen) ...

After the Titanic A Life of Derek Mahon

I have finished reading this book and it gave a wonderful insight into the life and works of Derek Mahon and with quite a few surprises along the way.  He has written a poem about Elizabeth Bowen and that is one of the next books we are reading The Last September, so I will put the poem up on one of my next posts.

I am off to order Red Sails, a new book of essays and memoir published in October 2014 by Gallery Press.

The Poetry of Derek Mahon

Now for the heavy stuff ...

After collecting quite a lot of research on Derek Mahon and finishing the book After the Titanic A Life of Derek Mahon, I am going to start reading through quite a lot of his poetry.  I have read quite a few already, but Hugh Haughton's book The Poetry of Derek Mahon arrived a few weeks ago, so here goes ...

So stand by for some wonderful poems to be posted ...

Everything is going to be all right.

 

 

 

This poem just says it all ...

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).