SOURCE: Tinley, Bill. “International Perspectives in the Poetry of Derek Mahon.” Irish University Review 21, no. 1 (spring-summer 1991): 106-17.

In the following essay, Tinley emphasizes Mahon's connections to poets including Gérard de Nerval, Philippe Jaccottet, François Villon, Bertolt Brecht, and others to highlight the international quality of Mahon's work. Nonetheless, Tinley contends that Mahon's adaptations of European sources also reflect ambivalence about the poet's position as outsider.

Derek Mahon has always operated outside the comfortable and comforting confines of Irish poetry. In an interview with Harriet Cooke, he has said that Irish writers “should be judged by London, New York standards”,¹ in effect distancing himself from the Irish literary scene. On the one hand, Mahon dislikes the cosiness of a literature which does not look beyond its immediate environment, which does not search for the major theme among the minor ones; on the other, he is attracted to...