Derek Mahon, best known as a poet, worked as a freelance journalist for many years, and his first prose book brings together a selection of his feature articles, lectures and book reviews. Some of these, like the essays on MacNeice and Beckett, Brian Moore and J. G. Farrell, are seriously 'literary' in nature; while others, like the reports from Coleraine, Rome and Los Angeles, are more discursive and relaxed, if not downright mischievous.

Reviews

Best known for his poetry, the Belfast-born Mahon here collects 57 short essays that have appeared over the past 20 years in various publications, primarily the Irish Times. Despite the format, though, he is still clearly a poet. In "A Tribute to Beckett on his Eightieth Birthday" Mahon recalls meeting the great Irish playwright and seeing his fingers, "gnarled arthritic trees." In "Joyce's Wild Goose" he repeats what the novelist's father said when hearing the name of the young woman his son had run away with: "Barnacle? She'll never leave him." He also reminisces about drinking in Dublin with the young Eavan Boland while still at Trinity; looks at Oscar Wilde's Fenianism; observes that "there are different kinds of alcoholic writer" in an essay on Malcolm Lowry; and observes that "Great stretches of [J.P.] Donleavy are thoroughly tiresome and inconsequential." His portrait of Portrush-the "Ulster Riviera" in County Antrim-is delightful in a sad way; his joyful recollection of the Trinity College Garden Party is a delight, as is his vision of Dublin in the '60s: "wonderfully seedy and raffish." Mahon, considered by many the greatest poet in Ireland after Seamus Heaney, proves himself a fine essayist who is sure to have something for everyone in this collection.

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