Hope there isn't another active thread on him on this board. It took an age to check back to June 2002!

There is plenty of biographical material on the new and I guess most Erastopherians whill be familiar with his oft-anthologised 'A disused shed in Co.Wexford'.

Have chosen this poem partly because it is one of my favourites and partly of its sophisticated pacing (see General Talk threads). I love the way the use of repetition and heavy rhyming ('masculine' and 'feminine') in st 2 almost brings a poem to a standstill, reflecting the strong attraction for Mahon of the traditional Irish lifestyle and mellifluous poetry which are not nevertheles for him. As has been pointed out elsewhere, pacing is a matter of content as well as style. Had the image of the seagull not been introduced in st 1 and thus readily available for elaboration in st 3 the unity of the piece might have been spoilt by the temporary pause (which is of course characteristic of much traditional song).


Aran

(for Tom and Peggy Mac Intyre)

He is earthed to his girl, one hand fastened
In hers, and with his free hand listens,
An earphone, to his own rendition
Singing the darkness into the light.
I close the pub door gently and step out
Into the yard and the song goes out
And a gull creaks off from the tin roof
Of an outhouse, planing over the ocean,
Circling now with a hoarse inchoate
Screaming the boned fields of its vision.
God, that was the way to do it,
Hand-clasping, echo-prolonging poet!

Scorched with a fearful admiration,
Walking over the nacreous sand,
I dream myself to that tradition
Generations off the land -
One hand to an ear for the vibration,
The far wires, the reverberation
Down light-years of the imagination
And a loved hand in the other hand.

The long glow springs from the dark soil, however -
No marsh-light holds a candle to this;
Unearthly still in its white weather
A crack-voiced rock-marauder, scavenger, fierce
Friend to no slant fields or the sea either,
Folds back over the forming waters.

[A. E. Stallings]

Thanks very much for posting this, which is quite gorgeous. I particularly like the effect of the repetition rather than rhyme of out/out. If I had a quibble, it might be with "nacreous," which is one of those very poetic words it's hard to get away with.

The image of the "boned fields of vision" is very interesting. I take it to be the eyes in the bone sockets of the seagull, and picture a bird skull. But perhaps it has some other import.

No, I don't think we've had a thread on Mahon. In general, we (or I, anyway) are rather weak on contemporaries on your side of the Atlantic, and we're always grateful to have them brought to our attention.

Alicia,

You may well be right about the 'boned fields'. I thought of the 'small ambiguous bones' on Irish shores of which I wrote in one of my own poems. Maybe the leavings of a scavenging creature - maybe (given our troubled history) something more sinister. Best wishes, M. (I've promised myself a copy of your collection next month)

[David Mason]

I'm very glad to see a thread on Mahon, who is for my money one of the indispensable masters among our contemporaries. He's a poet who revises his work so obsessively that it's hard to find definitive texts, but there is a very good Collected Poems available--try amazon or amazon.com.uk and even a Selected Poems from Penguin. Since my copies seem to be at my office twenty miles away, I'll just quote this very simple little poem of his from memory:

EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALL RIGHT

How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond a dormer window
and a high tide reflected upon the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden,
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything,
and the far cities are beautiful, and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight,
watching the day break, and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.


I've probably messed up punctuation, etc., and you have to realize that this poem was composed not only in the context of Mahon's private tribulations, but also the Troubles of Northern Ireland. He's not being sentimental so much as he's being hopeful, I think.

In any case, if I run across the books before this thread thins out I'll quote some other favorites.

[Tim Murphy]

When David was sending me boyos to tutor, they all memorized
Everything Is Going To Be All Right. They spoke it to one another in the cafes, the gay bars. It is an unspeakably great lyric, As is Achill, and so many other of Mahon's poems. Never understood why the world made such a fuss about Heaney. Mahon is the greatest Irishman since Yeats.

Thanks for that contribution, David. Not one at the top of my head but I did enjoy it.

Well, Tim,

I'm not sure I would go that far. My Mahon Collected is well worth its price to me for a couple of dozen poems I would consider first-rate. Will pop up another examnple when I have the volume to hand. There are quite a few others which attract me because of their themes but don't seem altogether successful. However, some of the later pieces strike me as padded out and unattractively self-obsessed.

Best, Margaret.

[This message has been edited by Campoem (edited May 22, 2003).]

[David Mason]

You might be referring to the baggy, essayistic poems of The Hudson Letter and The Yellow Room. More recent Mahon is Swiftian and self-lacerating for my money. For pleasanter fare, here's the final section of "Roman Script":

I invent dreams and stories, and even as I outline
dreams and romances on the unwritten page
I enter them with so soft a heart
I weep at evils of my own design.
I've more sense when not deceived by art;
the creative spirit is quiet then and rage,
love, genuine emotions, spring for once
from real life and from felt experience.

Ah, but words on the page aren't the whole story
for all my hopes and fears are fictions too
and I live in a virtual fever of creation--
the whole course of my life has been imagination,
my days a dream; when we wake from history
may we find peace in the substance of the true.

Here are the last two sections of "St. Patrick's Day":

viii.
I now resign these structures and devices,
these fancy flourishes and funny voices
to a post-literate, audio-visual realm
of uncial flourescence, song and film,
a curious symptoms of a weird transition
before we opted to be slaves of fashion
--for now, whatever our ancestral dream,
we give ourselves to a vast corporate scheme
where our true wit is devalued once again,
our solitude remembered by the rain.

ix.
The one reality is the perpetual flow,
chaos of complex systems; each generation
does what it must; middle age and misanthropy,
like famine and religion, make poor copy;
and even the present vanishes like snow
off a rope, frost off a ditch, ice in the sun--
so back to the desk-top and the drawing board,
prismatic natural light, slow-moving cloud,
the waves far-thundering in a life of their own,
a young woman hitching a lift on a country road.


And here's a fairly nasty early poem I've always liked:

The Mute Phenomena

Your great mistake is to disregard the satire
Bandied among the mute phenomena.
Be strong if you must, your brisk hegemony
Means fuck-all to the somnolent sunflower
Or the extinct volcano. What do you know
Of the revolutionary theories advanced
By turnips, or the sex-life of cutlery?
Everything's susceptible, Pythagoras said so.

An ordinary common-or-garden brick wall, the kind
For talking to or banging your head on,
Resents your politics and bad draftsmanship.
God is alive and lives under a stone;
Already in a lost hub-cap is conceived
The ideal society which will replace our own.

David,
Thanks for posting these. I certainly wouldn't wish to condemn all the later work.

Tim,
I usually chicken out of ranking projects, bu if push came to shove would probably rate MacNeice above Mahon when considering Irish poets writing in English.

I append one of DM's minor pieces which appeals to me - not because of its writer's block theme or first-person treatment of an object - the latter now so popular among workshop facilitators. What I like is its play with the literal and metaphorical uses of a colloquialism - in this case 'Back to the drawing-board'. Such poems appeal to me - I recall a poignant one in an English mag. which made skilful use of the phrase 'the last thing he wanted.'

The Drawing Board

You think I am your servant but you are wrong -
The service lies in you. During your long
Labours at me, I am the indulgent wood,
Tolerant of your painstaking ineptitude.
Your poems were torn from me by violence;
I am here to receive your homage in dark silence.

Remembering the chainsaw surgery and the seaward groan,
Like a bound and goaded exodus from Babylon,
I pray for a wood-spirit to make me dance,
To scare your pants off and upset your balance,
Destroy the sedate poise with which you pour
Forth your ephemeral stream of literature.

When I was a pine and lived in a cold climate
I listened to leaf-rumours about our fate;
But I have come a long way since then
To watch the sun glint on your reflective pen.
The hurt I do resent, and my consolation
Will be the unspoilt paper when you have gone.

And yet I love you, even in your ignorance,
Perhaps because at last you are making sense -
Talking to me, not through me, recognizing
That it is I alone who let you sing
Wood music; hitherto shadowy and dumb,
I speak to you now as your indispensable medium.

I assume the melancholy tone is meant to reflect the pain felt by DM and all of us (on occasion)when 'going back to the drawing board' or rootling around in the 'rag and bone shop of the heart'.

Margaret.

[David Mason]

You can see a similar rag and bone shop theme in the late stanzas I posted. I like his playful way of dealing with objects in "Table Talk" and "Rock Music" as well, and in "Lives," the poem he wrote for Heaney. There are also very good meditations on the Troubles, Belfast, etc. So I do encourage people to look him up.

[FOsen]

This is a slight one from the Selected Poems. I like bone-idle (rather than weary) as the dejected state. Thanks for commending him. He's a great talent combined with a very approachable sensibility.

Dejection

Bone-idle, I lie listening to the rain,
Not tragic now nor yet to frenzy bold.
Must I stand out in thunder storms again
Who have twice come in from the cold?