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Norman Derek Mahon (23 November 1941 – 1 October 2020) was an Irish poet. He was born in , Northern Ireland, but lived in a number of cities around the world. At his death it was noted that his "influence in the Irish poetry community, literary world and society at large, and his legacy, is immense". President of Ireland Michael D Higgins said of Mahon, "he shared with his northern peers the capacity to link the classical and the contemporary but he brought also an edge that was unsparing of cruelty and wickedness."

Biography
Derek Mahon was born on 23 November 1941 as the only child of Ulster Protestant working-class parents. His father and grandfather worked at Harland and Wolff while his mother worked at a local flax mill. During his childhood, he claims he was something of a solitary dreamer, comfortable with his own company yet aware of the world around him. Interested in literature from an early age, he attended Skegoneill Primary School and then the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, or "Inst".

At Inst he encountered fellow students who shared his interest in literature and poetry. The school produced a magazine in which Mahon produced some of his early poems. According to the critic his early poems were highly fluent and extraordinary for a person so young. His parents could not see the point of poetry, but he set out to prove them wrong after he won his school's Memorial Prize for the poem 'The power that gives the water breath'. Life of poet is work in progress Cork Examiner 11 October 2014. Retrieved 3 October 2020.

Mahon pursued third level studies at Trinity College Dublin in French, English, and Philosophy and where he edited Icarus, and formed many friendships with writers such as , and . He started to mature as a poet. He left Trinity in 1965 to take up studies at the Sorbonne in Paris.

After leaving the Sorbonne in 1966 he worked his way through Canada and the United States. In 1968, while spending a year teaching English at Belfast High School, he published his first collection of poems Night Crossing. He later taught in a school in Dublin and worked in London as a freelance journalist. He lived in , County Cork. On 23 March 2007, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. He won the Poetry Now Award in 2006 for his collection, Harbour Lights, and again in 2009 for his Life on Earth collection. Mahon wins 'Irish Times' poetry prize for new collection Irish Times, 28 March 2009.

At times expressing anti-establishment values, Mahon has described himself as, an 'aesthete' with a penchant 'for left-wingery ... to which, perhaps naively, I adhere.'

His papers are held at .

In March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, RTÉ News ended its evening broadcast with Mahon reading his poem Everything Is Going to Be All Right.

On 1 October 2020, Mahon died in Cork after a short illness, aged 78.

He is survived by his partner Sarah Iremonger and his three children, Rory, Katy, and Maisie.

Mahon features on the Irish Leaving Certificate course with ten of his poems (Grandfather, Day Trip to Donegal, Ecclesiastes, After the Titanic, As It Should Be, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, Rathlin, The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush, Kinsale and Antarctica) Https://assets.gov.ie/120293/2e2f966b-69ca-4cea-be9e-0baacb287a26.pdf#page=null" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">[3].

Style
Thoroughly educated and with a keen understanding of literary tradition, Mahon came out of the tumult of Northern Ireland with a formal, moderate, even restrained poetic voice. In an era of , Mahon often wrote in received forms, using a broadly applied version of iambic pentameter that, metrically, resembles the "sprung foot" verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Some poems rhyme. Even the Irish landscape itself is never all that far from the classical tradition, as in his poem "Achill":
towers like Naxos over the water
:And I think of my daughter at work on her difficult art
And wish she were with me now between thrush and plover,
:Wild thyme and sea-thrift, to lift the weight from my heart.
He has also explored the genre of : the poetic reinterpretation of visual art. In that respect, he was interested in 17th-century Dutch and art.

Publications
Poetry: Main Collections
  • 1968: Night-Crossing, Oxford University Press
  • 1972: Lives, Oxford University Press
  • 1975: The Snow Party, Oxford University Press
  • 1982: The Hunt By Night, Oxford University Press
  • 1995: The Hudson Letter, ; Wake Forest University Press, 1996
  • 1997: The Yellow Book, ; Wake Forest University Press, 1998
  • 2005: Harbour Lights, (winner of the 2006 Irish Times Poetry Now Award)
  • 2008: Life on Earth, (winner of the 2009 Irish Times Poetry Now Award)
  • 2010: An Autumn Wind.,
  • 2018: Against the Clock,
  • 2020: Washing Up,

Limited Editions and Booklets (Poetry)
  • 1965: Twelve Poems, Festival Publications, Belfast
  • 1970: Ecclesiastes, Phoenix Pamphlet Poets
  • 1970: Beyond Howth Head, Dolmen Press
  • 1977: In Their Element, Arts Council of Northern Ireland
  • 1979: The Sea in Winter,
  • 1981: Courtyards in Delft,
  • 1984: A Kensington Notebook, Anvil Press
  • 1985: Antarctica,
  • 1992: The Yaddo Letter,
  • 1999: Roman Script,
  • 2001: Resistance Days,
  • 2007: Somewhere the Wave,

Translations / Versions / Editions

Poetry: Selected Editions

Prose

As Editor
  • 2001: Jonathan Swift - Poems selected by Derek Mahon, Faber and Faber

Critical studies and reviews of Mahon's work
  • Enniss, Stephen (2014) After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon, Gill & Macmillan
  • Haughton, Hugh (2007) The Poetry of Derek Mahon, Oxford University Press
  • Jarniewicz, Jerzy (2013) Ekphrasis in the Poetry of Derek Mahon, NWP Piotrkow,
  • Review of Echo's grove.
  • Autumn Skies: Writers on Poems by Derek Mahon,

Honours
  • 1965 – Eric Gregory Award for poetry
  • 1989 – Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize
  • 1990 – Lannan Literary Awards for Poetry
  • 1992 – The Irish Times-Aer Lingus Poetry Prize
  • 1995 – Honorary doctorate Trinity College Dublin.
  • 2001 – Honorary doctorate – for work reflecting the enduring aesthetic of achievement in contemporary Irish writing.
  • 2007 – David Cohen Prize for Literature – in recognition of his 'lifetime's achievement'
  • Member, Aosdána
  • Irish Academy of Letters Award
  • Guggenheim Fellowship
  • 2020 – Irish Times Poetry Now award

See also
  • List of Northern Irish writers

Further reading
  • Allen Randolph, Jody. Derek Mahon: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Irish University Review: Special Issue: Derek Mahon 24.1 (Spring/Summer 1994): 131–156.
  • Reggiani, Enrico. In Attesa della Vita, Introduzione alla Poetica di Derek Mahon, Vita e Pensiero, Milano 1996, pp. 432 seconda
  • Haughton, Hugh. The Poetry of Derek Mahon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
  • Jarniewicz, Jerzy. Ekphrasis in the Poetry of Derek Mahon, Piotrkow: NWP Press, 2013, pp. 275,
  • Christopher Steare: Derek Mahon : a study of his poetry, London : Greenwich Exchange, 2017,

External links

: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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