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 has often written 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 has been interested in 17th century Dutch and Flemish art.
Mahon has been cited as a major influence by a number of Irish poets, including Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland and Eamon Grennan.
Read more about this topic: Derek Mahon
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—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“I am so tired of taking to others
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—Lorraine Bethel, African American lesbian feminist poet. “What Chou Mean We, White Girl?” Lines 49-54 (1979)
“A church that can never have done with excommunicating Christ while it exists! Away with your broad and flat churches, and your narrow and tall churches! Take a step forward, and invent a new style of out-houses. Invent a salt that will save you, and defend our nostrils.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)