In a verse letter by Michael Longley, a fellow Ulsterman, Derek Mahon is addressed approvingly as one of the "poetic conservatives". He might well take umbrage; for the spirit that emerges from his poems is one which, while it hungers for ceremony and inherited order, has only the wannest faith that ceremony survives or that such order has relevance. Wistful, reticent, resigned, the poems in The Snow Party sound like the fastidious reflections of self-imposed exile….

Lost futures, rather than Mr [Seamus] Heaney's lost pasts, are the substance of Mr Mahon's poems. "The Last of the Fire Kings", "Thammuz", "The Banished Gods" and (a beautifully judged stroke of minimalism) "Flying" are all hesitant reachings forward to possibilities just beyond the range of understanding. In these, and in other poems such as "The Snow Party" and in parts of the "Cavafy" sequence, there is a sardonic aestheticism, a diffident...