SOURCE: Johnston, Dillon. “Unaccommodated Mahon: An Ulster Poet.” The Hollins Critic 17, no. 5 (December 1980): 1-16.

In the following essay, Johnston looks at the tension between art and history in Mahon's poetry, focusing on the poems from Poems 1962-1978. Johnston also considers Mahon's relationships with previous authors, through allusion, indirect homage, and influence.

I

If we concede that Derek Mahon does not fit squarely into the Irish poetic tradition, we may establish the idea that this tradition is multilateral. The facts that this young Belfast poet has lived outside of Ireland during most of the last decade and that he addresses the Troubles in Ulster only rarely and indirectly have misled one TLS reviewer to label him “the least locally attached” of the recognized Ulster poets, such as John Hewitt, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, James Simmons, and Paul Muldoon. Except in Montague's Rough Field and Heaney's North, however...