‘Derek Mahon’s recent collection of poems entitled The Yellow Book takes its name from the notorious magazine that went out of publication soon after Wilde’s trials for ‘indecent [homosexual] behaviour’ because of its association with ‘immorality’. The magazine is seen as central to the Late Victorian literary period ofthe 1890s which, itself, is often called ‘the Yellow Nineties’ or ‘the Decadence’. In his collection of poetty, Mahon is consciously meditating on both Decadent themes and writers as subjects befitting the close ofthe millennium and the end of various empires and styles of Western civilisation. There are references to artists of the Roman Silver Age, as well as to the French and English Decadence throughout the collection. These vary from two loose translations of Baudelaire, a paraphrase of Apuleius parodying the age’s gross sexual license, and a famous phrase snatched from Burke lamenting the rise of opportunism during the French Revolution. There are also poems dedicated to Wilde (”Rue Des Beaux-Arts”) and to other writers of the 1890s (”Remembering the 90s”) as well as allusions to artists such as Whistler, who were either associated with Wilde and/or more generally with cultural decadence. Mahon’s formal and thematic task as a satirist is to fulfill the epigraph to the collection by Palinurus: “To live in a decadence need not make us despair; it is but one technical problem more which a writer has to solve.” He sets about finding the solution for the decadent situation in global terms (‘Like a storm lantern the wintry planet swings” in “Night Thoughts”) in terms of Westem culture (”Schopenhauer’s Day”), and more specifically in terms of America (”America Deserta’) and of Northern and Southern Ireland (”Death in Bangor” and “shiver in your tenement”.) Mahon’s satirical position as regards the decadence of various cultures calls to mind such satirists as Juvenal; for certainly Mahon’s highly witty, insightful collection accords with the Roman satirist’s view that his “age can endure neither its vices nor their cures.” Moreover, Mahon’s translation of Juvenal, entitled “The Idiocy of Human Aspiration”, coming mid-way in the twenty-part volume, shows how central satire is to the volume. The Yellow Book is both a sophisticated elegy to themes that are no longer viable at the close of the millennium and the beginning of the next, and a satire of present values. Mahon criticises the sometimes cynical materialism of the present age in both its economic and philosophical guises. He laments the lost of the ‘sublime’ in literature (”At the Gate Theatre”) and to feel that the freedoms of high-tech society lack clarity and aim: “What, in our new freedom, have we left to say?” He thinks that perhaps “art, like life itself, [has] its source in agony”, and that contemporary artists should remember this. In his aesthetic we feel the force of the insight that if the relationship between modernity or postmodemity and tradition had been treated more subtly by our consumerist age, many worthwhile aspects of the past might have been spared. He also shrewdly knows that in some way we are all implicated in the ills of our times.

‘Sexual ecstasy and sublime communication still seem to have the power to outlast death, while visions of apocalypse are overcome by permanent forms of love. The positive sublime meeans the end of terror and the beginning of absolute unity.’ (p.64.) (Discussing poem for Pasolini in The Yellow Book): ‘The uncanny truth is that the ugliest aspect of humanity may be its salvation; sexual desperation is a form of hope as well as fear. This is the revolutionary “true direction we have lost”. [...] He [Mahon] concludes that the rage and fever of cration and being, like the terror of the sublime, is only meaningful when they find “peace in the substance of the true.”’ (End; p.68.)