SOURCE: Brown, Terence. “Derek Mahon: The Poet and Painting.” Irish University Review 24, no. 1 (spring-summer 1994): 38-50.

In the following essay, Brown discusses the strength of Mahon's visual observations, especially his careful attention to light. Reading several of Mahon's poems that describe works by a number of artists, Brown finds Mahon frequently meditating on the tension between the beauty of art and the brutality of life.

Light plays a crucial part in the imaginative world of Derek Mahon's poetry. He is in fact a markedly visual poet, one who attends patiently, even contemplatively, to the look of things and especially to the way light falls on them. The opening stanza of “A Postcard from Berlin” is entirely typical of a poet whose impressions of the world are refracted through an eye caught by the glimmer of light on water, the flash of sunlight through cloud, the bright glitter of the...