[Mahon's] imagination seems to be at once haunted and attracted by the thought of a total apocalyptic disaster which would wipe out the mess of the modern world and leave instead only the ticking of "a slow clock of condensation." Yet his other favorite scenario, "the ideal society which will replace our own," is as elusive and as ironically observed as the apocalypse. For between these two falls the shadow of Belfast, the dark industrial waste in which Mr. Mahon goes time and again to seek what he calls "the original poetry of our lives." The violence of recent years and the weight of the north's urban and spiritual dreariness have increasingly left their imprint on Mahon's work. From one point of view which he assumes, Belfast is the wasteland, the terminal point, the very antithesis of what a culture might be. But it is also the poet's...