Derek Mahon

Norman Derek Mahon (23 November 1941 – 1 October 2020) was an Irish poet. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but lived in a number of cities around the world. At his death it was noted that his "influence in the Irish poetry community, literary world and society at large, and his legacy, is immense". President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins said of Mahon, "he shared with his northern peers the capacity to link the classical and the contemporary but he brought also an edge that was unsparing of cruelty and wickedness."

Biography Derek Mahon was born on 23 November 1941 as the only child of Ulster Protestant working-class parents. His father and grandfather worked at Harland and Wolff while his mother worked at a local flax mill. During his childhood, he claims he was something of a solitary dreamer, comfortable with his own company yet aware of the world around him. Interested in literature from an early age, he attended Skegoneill Primary School and then the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, or "Inst".

At Inst he encountered fellow students who shared his interest in literature and poetry. The school produced a magazine in which Mahon published some of his early poems. According to the critic Hugh Haughton his early poems were highly fluent and extraordinary for a person so young. His parents could not see the point of poetry, but he set out to prove them wrong after he won his school's Forrest Reid Memorial Prize for the poem 'The power that gives the water breath'.Life of poet is work in progress Cork Examiner 11 October 2014. Retrieved 3 October 2020.

Mahon pursued third level studies at Trinity College Dublin in French, English, and Philosophy and where he edited Icarus, and formed many friendships with writers such as Michael Longley, Eavan Boland and Brendan Kennelly. He started to mature as a poet. He left Trinity in 1965 to take up studies at the Sorbonne in Paris.

After leaving the Sorbonne in 1966 he worked his way through Canada and the United States. In 1968, while spending a year teaching English at Belfast High School, he published Night Crossing, his first collection of poems. He later taught in a school in Dublin and worked in London as a freelance journalist. He lived in Kinsale, County Cork. On 23 March 2007, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. He won the Poetry Now Award in 2006 for his collection, Harbour Lights, and again in 2009 for his Life on Earth collection.Mahon wins 'Irish Times' poetry prize for new collection Irish Times, 28 March 2009.

At times expressing anti-establishment values, Mahon has described himself as, an 'aesthete' with a penchant 'for left-wingery [...] to which, perhaps naively, I adhere.'

His papers are held at Emory University.

In March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, RTÉ News ended its evening broadcast with Mahon reading his poem Everything Is Going to Be All Right.

On 1 October 2020, Mahon died in Cork after a short illness, aged 78.

He is survived by his partner Sarah Iremonger and his three children, Rory, Katy, and Maisie.

Mahon features on the Irish Leaving Certificate course with ten of his poems (Grandfather, Day Trip to Donegal, Ecclesiastes, After the Titanic, As It Should Be, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, Rathlin, The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush, Kinsale and Antarctica).

Style Thoroughly educated and with a keen understanding of literary tradition, Mahon came out of the tumult of Northern Ireland with a formal, moderate, even restrained poetic voice. In an era of free verse, Mahon often wrote in received forms, using a broadly applied version of iambic pentameter that, metrically, resembles the "sprung foot" verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Some poems rhyme. Even the Irish landscape itself is never all that far from the classical tradition, as in his poem "Achill": Croagh Patrick towers like Naxos over the water And I think of my daughter at work on her difficult art And wish she were with me now between thrush and plover, Wild thyme and sea-thrift, to lift the weight from my heart. He has also explored the genre of ekphrasis: the poetic reinterpretation of visual art. In that respect, he was interested in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art.

Publications

Poetry: Main Collections 1968: Night-Crossing, Oxford University Press 1972: Lives, Oxford University Press 1975: The Snow Party, Oxford University Press 1982: The Hunt By Night, Oxford University Press 1995: The Hudson Letter, Gallery Press; Wake Forest University Press, 1996 1997: The Yellow Book, Gallery Press; Wake Forest University Press, 1998 2005: Harbour Lights, Gallery Press (winner of the 2006 Irish Times Poetry Now Award) 2008: Life on Earth, Gallery Press (winner of the 2009 Irish Times Poetry Now Award) 2010: An Autumn Wind., Gallery Press 2018: Against the Clock, Gallery Press 2020: Washing Up, Gallery Press

Limited Editions and Booklets (Poetry) 1965: Twelve Poems, Festival Publications, Belfast 1970: Ecclesiastes, Phoenix Pamphlet Poets 1970: Beyond Howth Head, Dolmen Press 1977: In Their Element, Arts Council of Northern Ireland 1979: The Sea in Winter, Gallery Press 1981: Courtyards in Delft, Gallery Press 1984: A Kensington Notebook, Anvil Press 1985: Antarctica, Gallery Press 1992: The Yaddo Letter, Gallery Press 1999: Roman Script, Gallery Press 2001: Resistance Days, Gallery Press 2007: Somewhere the Wave, Gallery Press

Translations / Versions / Editions 1982: The Chimeras (a version of Les Chimères, by Nerval), Gallery Press 1985: High Time (a version of Molière's A School for Husbands), Gallery Press 1986: The School for Wives (after Molière), Gallery Press 1988: The Selected Poems of Philippe Jaccottet, Viking Press 1996: The Bacchae of Euripides, and Racine's Phaedra, Gallery Press 1998: Words in the Air Gallery Press 2001: The Seaside Cemetery (a version of 'Le Cimetiere marin' by Paul Valery, Gallery Press 2002: Birds (a version of Oiseaux, by Saint-John Perse), Gallery Press 2004: Cyrano de Bergerac. (A version of the play by Edmond Rostand), Gallery Press 2005: Oedipus (A conflation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus), Gallery Press 2006: Adaptations (A collection of versions, rather than translations proper, from poets such as Pasolini, Juvenal, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Valéry, Baudelaire, Rilke and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill), Gallery Press 2011: Raw Material, Gallery Press 2013: Theatre, Gallery Press 2013: Echo's Grove: Collected Translations, Gallery Press 2023: The Adaptations (1975-2020), Gallery Press

Poetry: Selected Editions 1979: Poems 1962–1978, Oxford University Press 1991: Selected Poems, Viking Books/ Gallery Press; Paperback: Penguin (1993) 1999: Collected Poems, Gallery Press 2011: New Collected Poems, Gallery Press 2016: New Selected Poems, Faber & Faber; Gallery Press 2021: The Poems (1961-2020), Gallery Press

Prose 1996: Journalism: Selected Prose, 1970-1995 Ed. Terence Brown, Gallery Press 2012: Selected Prose, Gallery Press 2017: The Rain Bridge (for children), Gallery Press 2017: Olympia and the Internet, Gallery Press 2023: The Prose (1971-2020), Gallery Press

As Editor 2001: Jonathan Swift - Poems selected by Derek Mahon, Faber and Faber

Critical studies and reviews of Mahon's work Enniss, Stephen (2014) After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon, Gill & Macmillan Haughton, Hugh (2007) The Poetry of Derek Mahon, Oxford University Press Jarniewicz, Jerzy (2013) Ekphrasis in the Poetry of Derek Mahon, NWP Piotrkow, Review of Echo's grove. Autumn Skies: Writers on Poems by Derek Mahon, Gallery Press

Honours 1965 – Eric Gregory Award for poetry 1989 – Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize 1990 – Lannan Literary Awards for Poetry 1992 – The Irish Times-Aer Lingus Poetry Prize 1995 – Honorary doctorate Trinity College Dublin. 2001 – Honorary doctorate NUI Galway – for work reflecting the enduring aesthetic of achievement in contemporary Irish writing. 2007 – David Cohen Prize for Literature – in recognition of his 'lifetime's achievement' Member, Aosdána Irish Academy of Letters Award Guggenheim Fellowship 2020 – Irish Times Poetry Now award

Derek Mahon

Bron en licentie