The Hudson Letter Format: Paperback

Mahon writes from lower Manhattan, addressing, in ramble or vigil, his absent lover, his children in London, Auden, Yeats’s father, and other cosmic vagrants, “clutching our bits and pieces, arrogant in dereliction.” In the eighteen sections of “The Hudson Letter,” the gabble of a dockside bar, voices of a recycled Sappho and of an Irish immigrant girl reassuring her mother in Inishannon, and the midwinter, all-night sounds of the City intersperse with the voice of the poet—lively, witty, poignant, elegiac, humane, and thoroughly human. “The Hudson Letter” is prefaced by four new poems in different voices.

Derek Mahon was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1941 and was educated at Trinity College in Dublin and at the Sorbonne in Paris. Wake Forest published three of his volumes: The Hunt by Night (1982, redesigned in 1995), The Hudson Letter (1996), and The Yellow Book (1998), as well as his translation of Philippe Jaccottet’s Selected Poems in 1988. He has written many volumes of poetry, translations, and plays, and edited The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1990) and Modern Irish Poetry (1972). His many honors include the Irish American Foundation Award, a Lannan Foundation Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the Arts Council Bursary, the Eric Gregory Award, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature.