Derek Mahon’s poetry expresses a longing to be free from history. In this respect he is recognisably an Irish poet, although part of that longing arises from the wish to be free from that category too. [.../] He is not urbane in a self-conscious way, as if afraid of being thought bucolic. His urbanity helps him to fend off the forces of atavism, ignorance and oppression which are part of his Northern Protestant heritage. There is an ease and an elegance in his writing which can be identified as that of the world-citizen, but the urbs from which his urbanity arises is the city of Belfast, a bleak and ruined site - so that the wit and sophistication of the poetry is haunted by intimations of collapse, pogrom, apocalypse.’ (p.156.)

‘The mood of poems like this one [“What will Remain”] is elegiac yet it is no more than an inflection away from satire. History is not evaded but it is included in a negative way. It merits both contempt and tenderness ... (157); ‘In deflecting history in this way, Mahon makes great demans on his style, on sheer grace of expression, keeping it light, bright and sparkling even when the matter of the poem is so laden and intractable.’ (p.158).

‘It would be possible to write of Mahon’s poetry as though it enacted a drama of belionging and not belonging to a country itself isolated from world history, divided within itself, obsessed by competing mythologies, Northern and Southern, ambiguously ensared in the subtle politics of colonialism and independence, a central void with violent peripheries. Deane cites Terence Brown’s allusion to Mahon’s ‘protestant’ poetry]. For Mahon does not enjoy or seek to have a sense of community with the kind of Ireland which is so dominant in Irish poetry.’ (p.159). ... Nevertheless, he was born into an historical community, that of Northern Irish Protestantism, and his most deeply flet poems derive from his sympathy for its isolation and its fading presence rather than from straightforward repudiation of it sstill rhetorical intransigence.’ (p.160.)

‘In Night-Crossing and Lives [the state of homelessness] had the virtue of freedom to recommend it ... it eventually becomes clear that the predominant emotion in most of these poems is grief. Homelessness has become a matter of sorrow now that the ruin of home has become a matter of fact. The sense that the repudiated ground may have harboured ... the opportunity to seize both maturity and stability together, sharpesn the regret and enforces a deeper interrogation of the liberal sentiments which had made so much of the advantage of freeing oneself from history. / It would be extravagant to say that Mahon now begins to elaborate some kind of confrontation with history, but he certainly dismisses it with less assurance.’ (p.161; also cited in part in John Goodby, op. cit., 1999, p.286 [ftn.]).

‘The subject of the meditation is the relationship between civility and barbarity, the thin partitions which divide them, the deep bonds which conjoin them. In entering upon this territory, Mahon reveals his companionship with John Montague, Seamus Heaney and Thomas Kinsella, all of whom are forced into this trying area by the pressure of contemporary circumstance. [...]’ (pp.161).

‘A recognition of the depths from which violence springs often leads to feelings of dismay at the apparent shallowness of the liberal or rational mentality. Mahon’s contempt for the modern socialist, the professional tourist, who visits and measures everything and knows nothing, the expert locked in his own force-field, is inexhaustible. Such a creature is indeed one of the products of secular civility. Emotionally gelded, he cannot know the lust for history of the grief of utter loss which the instinctual life knows. He is a visitor among the afterlives of dead opportunities ... He is the mirror-image of atavism. He is as doomed by his disengagement from feeling as is atavism by its surrender to feeling. Mahon distinguishes for us between feelings that are temperate and feelings that are tempered. ... The heartening and enriching aspects of his poetry emerge from his capacity to match the extremes of the situations he observes with a corresponding feeling which is no itself contaminated by that extremism. ... But he does not, finally, concede what we may call his liberal individualism, his “protestant” ethic of the independent imagination.’ (p.161; quoted in part in John Goodby, ‘Reading Protestant Writing: Representations of the Troubles in the Poetry of Derek Mahon and Glenn Patterson’sBurning Your Own’, in Kathleen Devine, ed.,Modern Irish Writers and the Wars, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1999, p.232, where the passages is said to be ‘remarkable for its animus to the idea of class, even its self-loathing as for the light it sheds on Mahon’].

Deane accuses Mahon of unwillingness to examine the precarious existence of his ‘liberal individualism, his “protestant” ethic of the independent imagination.’ (p.162.)

‘But he is also saying that the only life which can produce art is one that is engaged with history, even (especially?) if it is the history of the victims, the lost, the forgotten. / In effect, I am suggesting that Mahon establishes in The Snow Pasrt a way of meditating about poetry and history which enriches his work by rescuing it from the conventional attitudes towards this elusive and yet central relationship. .. a humaneness of feeling which has the force of passion and which yet remains distinct from violent feeling. [Further remarks on “A Courtyard in Delft” depend on identification of British or Dutch imperial violence as the axis of debate.] (p.163). The relief from the pressure of history which places and paintings share is now understood to be simultaneously real and illusory. They are not images that have passed beyond history; they are images which have incorporated history’s force into their stillness. If the end of this art is peace, its origin is in the violence of the actual. [...]’ (p.164.)

‘The formal control of his poems is an expression of a kind of moral stoicism, a mark of endurance under pressure. ... A dishevelled history, an orderly poetry: the play of mind which is released by this conflict is itself the final freedom.’