SOURCE: Kendall, Tim. “‘Leavetakings and Homecomings’: Derek Mahon's Belfast.” Eire-Ireland 29, no. 4 (winter 1994): 101-16.

In the following essay, Kendall looks at Mahon's relation to his birthplace of Belfast, Ireland. Kendall sees in Mahon a strong rejection of Belfast and a discomfort with his connection to the city, but he argues that Mahon depends upon Belfast as the inspiration for his best work.

Derek Mahon's reputation for being “culturally rootless,”¹ inculcated with all the force of critical consensus, owes its authority to no one more than to the poet himself. Noting how his contemporary Seamus Heaney digs “deeper and deeper into his home ground,” Mahon by comparison pleads ignorance of his proper “place,” declaring himself a poet who, coincidentally enough, “just happened to be born in Belfast.”² However, such strenuous and often unprovoked denials betray a fundamental anxiety that the poet's home ground may have been more formative, and less...