Between Night Crossing in 1968 and his new collection, Lives, Derek Mahon produced a very promising … pamphlet called Ecclesiastes. It now looks like a bridge between a pleasant but slightly too romantic and too tidy early style and something much tougher and more ingenious. Lives is a very good book, difficult and cryptic, but far more versatile and skilful technically, and managing to be both original and moving about his troubled Irish settings without being derivative or simplistic. There is no comfort in his new poems, very little of the nostalgia he was once prone to. 'Entropy', the title of one of them, might be said to be a central theme: modern society, with its fitted carpets, 'ploughshare factories', 'bright cars' and 'ditched bicycles', is running down in this bleak, brooding landscape where the past offers no valid illusions to live by and a poet's 'germinal ironies' offer the...