The first poem in Derek Mahon's Lives is about arriving home in Dublin, distraught, after a Transatlantic flight: and something like the time- and place-confusion of jet-travellers gives the book its theme. The poems, written from that Atlantic island whose aerials are turned towards Britain and America, are about wanting to locate oneself, to decide to what parts of the human inheritance to direct one's aerial. Are signals still to be received from Raftery, the saints or Stone Age man? Or does the poet, like the anthropologist,

                    know too much
                    To be anything any more?

A beautiful poem, 'In the Aran Islands', turns, in construction as well as in thought, on this axis. Witnessing a pub-singer, one of his hands 'earthed to his girl', the other cupping his ear to hear his own song, the poet sees it as what he longs for himself—to be doubly located...