SOURCE: Clutterbuck, Catriona. “Elpenor's Crumbling Oar: Disconnection and Art in the Poetry of Derek Mahon.” Irish University Review 24, no. 1 (spring-summer 1994): 6-26.

In the following essay, Clutterbuck interprets Mahon's position on the link between art and reality as negative and sometimes cynical, doubting the existence of meaning in either art or life.

All I have is a little space, snow-dark or glittering—never inhabited. 

Derek Mahon, “Three Poems after Jaccottet”

In his poetry Derek Mahon is preoccupied with the disconnections between surface and subterranean realities and the exploration of these rifts for the act of writing itself. These disconnections include the division of Mahon from his background and of the poet from his people; of man from nature and from the objects he has manufactured; of ideal place from real place and of abandoned place from occupied place; of past from present and of afterlife from this life; and...