SOURCE: Williams, David E. “The Poetry of Derek Mahon.” The Journal of Irish Literature 13, no. 2 (September 1984): 88-99.

In the following essay, Williams describes Mahon's affinity for the perspective of the exile or outcast as one of the great strengths of his poetry. Williams also considers Mahon's stance towards the violence of Northern Ireland and the fine line between objectivity and indifference in the position of the outsider.

In Derek Mahon's great poem “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford,” by a wonderfully managed transition, the “thousand mushrooms” growing within an abandoned and burnt-out hotel in Ireland are gradually transformed into the passive victims of history, the “lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii,” appealing to the camera-carrying visitor to save them from their perpetual oblivion:

“Save us, save us,” they seem to say, “Let the god not abandon us Who have come so far in darkness and in pain. We...