Mahon experienced something of a late flowering, publishing four collections in
just five years in the 2000s. These books, have received a series of accolades and
commendations: Harbour Lights (2006), winner of the Irish Times Poetry Now
Award; Somewhere the Wave (2007); and Life on Earth (2008), which won
another Irish Times Poetry Now Award and was shortlisted for the prestigious
Griffin Poetry Prize. Mahon’s An Autumn Wind (2010) was praised by Paul
Batchelor in the Guardian for its sophistication, technical prowess and willingness
to address contemporary themes, including environmental degradation. Batchelor
maintained that the book “confirms the triumphant late flowering that began
with Harbour Lights and continued in Life on Earth. This body of work forms one
of the most significant developments in poetry this century.”
Early on, Mahon was perhaps too often praised as a “scrupulous craftsman.” Philip
Hobsbaum declared in Contemporary Poets that Mahon’s is “a poetry that
represents a decisive adaptation of Auden and MacNeice, Mahon’s two
acknowledged masters.” He added, “it may well in the end form an oeuvre fit to
stand beside theirs in literary history.”
Antarctica
By Derek Mahon
‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’
The others nod, pretending not to know.
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.
He leaves them reading and begins to climb,
Goading his ghost into the howling snow;
He is just going outside and may be some time.
The tent recedes beneath its crust of rime
And frostbite is replaced by vertigo:
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.
Need we consider it some sort of crime,
This numb self-sacrifice of the weakest? No,
He is just going outside and may be some time
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