Mahon: Selected Poems

Mahon, one of the most prominent contemporary Northern Irish poets, is unparalleled in his metrical and formal virtuosity. It's strange, then, that this is the first American edition of his poetry. His work may have taken longer to reach an American audience because of his almost neoclassical sensibility, a more distanced emotional tone than we are used to. In poem after poem, the writer uses his incisive line to illuminate history and personality, nature and culture, as in the often praised ``A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford'': ``Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel, / Among the bathtubs and the washbasins / A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.'' This elegiac vision of trapped and forgotten lives bespeaks Mahon's gift for discovering personae that beg us ``to speak on their behalf.'' The strength of his work is not observation, but imagination; as he puts it in ``Tractatus,'' the world is ``everything that is the case imaginatively.'' Mahon is also a preserver and practitioner of wit in its original sense, a quality we may have forgotten how to appreciate. A caveat: revised versions of some poems tend to smooth over the rough detail or the coarse word, thus reducing contrast, as though the poet believed that simple brilliance (technical, emotional) could not stand alone. (May)