Abstract

Derek Mahon's poetry is strikingly electric. His work is formally adroit, philosophically and politically aware, intellectually and emotionally shot through with a wide and sympathetic knowledge of international and, in particular, European art. Mahon has produced fine versions of Horace, Ovid and Pasternak;"Courtyards in Dreft" is a meditation on a painting by de Hooch while many of his best poems engage the work of such figures as Hamsun, Hopper, Brecht, Uccello, Munch and Wittgenstein. Yet, for practical and temperamental reasons, the art and literature of France exercise the most enduring and substantial influence on Mahon's poetry