Tuesday the 13th
Derek Mahon Books of Poetry
Night-Crossing. Oxford University Press, 1968 , Lives. OUP,1972. , The Snow Party. OUP, 1975. , Poems 1962-1978. OUP, 1979. , Courtyards in Delft. OUP, 1981. , The Hunt By Night. OUP, 1982. , Antarctica Gallery Press, 1985. , Selected Poems. Gallery Press, 1990. , Selected Poems. Viking, 1991. , The Yaddo Letter. Gallery Press, 1992. , The Hudson Letter. Gallery Press, 1995. , The Yellow Book. Gallery Press, 1997. , Collected Poems. Gallery Press, 1999. , Selected Poems. Penguin, 2001. , Harbour Lights. Gallery Press, 2005. , The Chimeras (a version of Les Chimères, by Nerval). Gallery Press, 1982. , High Time (a version of Molière's A School for Husbands). Gallery Press, 1985. , The Selected Poems of Philippe Jaccottet. Viking, 1988. , The Bacchae of Euripedes, and Racine's Phaedra. Gallery Press, 1996. , Birds (a version of Oiseaux, by Saint-John Perse). Gallery Press, 2002. , Cyrano de Bergerac. (A version of the play by Edmond Rostand.) Gallery Press, 2004. , Oedipus (A conflation of Sophocles' Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus.) Gallery Press, 2005. , Journalism: selected prose, 1970-1995. Ed. Terence Brown. Gallery Press, 1996.
Derek Mahon Links
Derek Mahon
Site http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/42
Derek Mahon was born in Belfast, North Ireland, in 1941. He was educated at Trinity College in Dublin. His books of poetry include The Hudson Letter (Wake Forest University Press, 1996); Selected Poems (1993); The Yaddo Letter (1992); Selected Poems (1991); Antarctica (1985); A Kensington Notebook (1984); The Hunt by Night (1982); Courtyards in Delft (1981); Poems, 1962-1978 (1979); The Sea in Winter (1979); In Their Element: A Selection of Poems (with Seamus Heaney, 1977); Light Music (1977); The Snow Party (1975); The Man Who Built His City in Snow (1972); Lives (1972); Beyond Howth Head (1970); Ecclesiastes (1970); Night-Crossing (1968); Design for a Grecian Urn (1967); and Twelve Poems (1965). Derek Mahon's published plays include The Bacchae: After Euripides (1991), The School for Wives: a play in two acts after Molière (1986), and High Time, an adaptation of a play by Molière. He has also edited The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1990) and Modern Irish Poetry (1972). He has translated Racine's Phaedra (1996); Selected Poems by Philip Jaccottet (1987), which won the Scott-Manriet Translation Prize; and The Chimeras by Nerval (1982). His honors include the Irish American Foundation Award, a Lannan Foundation Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the Arts Council Bursary, and the Eric Gregory Award.
Derek Mahon - Irish Writers Online
Site http://www.irishwriters-online.com/derekmahon.html
Derek Mahon was born in Belfast in 1941. His poetry collections are Night-Crossing (UK, Oxford University Press, 1968); Lives (OUP,1972); The Snow Party (OUP, 1975); Poems 1962-1978 (OUP, 1979); Courtyards in Delft (OUP, 1981); The Hunt By Night (OUP, 1982); Antarctica (Oldcastle, Co Meath, Gallery Books, 1985); Selected Poems ( Oldcastle, Co Meath, The Gallery Press, 1990); Selected Poems, (London & New York, Viking, and The Gallery Press, in association with OUP, 1991); The Yaddo Letter (The Gallery Press, limited edition of 350 copies, with a frontispiece by Barrie Cooke, 1992); The Yellow Book (The Gallery Press, 1997); The Hudson Letter (The Gallery Press, 1995, USA, Wake Forest University Press, 1996); Collected Poems (The Gallery Press, 1999); and Harbour Lights (The Gallery Press, 2005).
Derek Mahon - The Gallery Press
Site http://www.gallerypress.com/Authors/Dmahon/dmahon.html
Derek Mahon was born in Belfast in 1941, studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and the Sorbonne, and has held journalistic and academic appointments in London and New York. A member of Aosdána, he has received numerous awards including the Irish Academy of Letters Award, the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize, and Lannan and Guggenheim Fellowships. Publications from The Gallery Press include The Hudson Letter, The Yellow Book, Words in the Air (bilingual, with the French of Philippe Jaccottet), Birds (a translation of Oiseaux by Saint-John Perse), Harbour Lights (2005) (Winner of the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2006) and Adaptations (2006). His work for the theatre includes versions of Moliere's The School for Wives and High Time, Racine's Phaedra, The Bacchae (after Euripides), Cyrano de Bergerac (a new version of Rostand's 'heroic comedy') which opened at London's National Theatre in April, 2004 and Oedipus (after Sophocles) published in October 2005. His Collected Poems appeared in 1999 and a new Penguin Selected Poems in 2000.
Derek Mahon - Skool.ie
Site http://www.skoool.ie/skoool/examcentre_sc.asp?id=1245
* Derek Mahon grew up on the outskirts of Belfast. He was educated in Belfast, Trinity College Dublin and later at The Sorbonne in France. * He has worked at various manual jobs, and professionally as an editor, screenwriter, journalist, and lecturer. * His parents worked in the traditional local industries of Belfast. His father was the family breadwinner and worked in the local shipyard; his mother had worked in a linen factory. * The terror of air raids and blackouts impacted on his infancy in the 1940’s. * In his childhood, Mahon as a single child and loner developed the habit of observing and thinking about the things around him. * From his experience as a choirboy, Mahon developed a feeing for the rhythm of hymns. This influence led him to emphasise form and technique in his poetry. * Mahon's cultural reference point was Northern Ireland's planter culture with its sense of besiegement and its crusading instinct, its sectarian outlook and the violence involved in upholding its dominant position in the two nation province he grew up in. * Though Mahon’s family were not zealous about biblical Protestantism, his social and educational context was Protestant. Mahon grew to reject the limitations of the planter culture and its outlook. * Mahon longed to add to his inherited cultural influences by travelling. His poetry reflects that self-education, that cultural re-conditioning he chose for himself. Thus, he transcended the influences of his birthplace. * Mahon's poetry demonstrates his desire to set his initial experience of Belfast, his local context, within an international context. There's a vibrant and varied sense of place in Mahon’s poetry, usually from his outsider’s angle. * Mahon has spent much of his adult life away from Northern Ireland, mainly in London, America, Canada, Kinsale and nowadays in Dublin. * Thus, Mahon has chosen to be an exile, for both artistic and cultural reasons. * The artist in Mahon required him to be unattached. The barbaric strife of the troubles deepened his alienation. But as well as rejecting his roots he sought the loneliness and impartiality of the exile in order to write his kind of poetry. In so choosing, he was following in the footsteps of great Irish writers like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. * Thus, he is cosmopolitan by vocation, as well as an exile due to alienation. Hence, Mahon’s great opening line ‘Even now there are places where a thought might grow’ in ‘A Disused Shed’. * His poems deal with outsiders, the past, abandonment, culture, identity, suppression, denial, longing, the brutality of history and the possibility of future redemption. * His poetry is rhythmical, clinical, polished and intellectual. Mahon is an urbane aesthete. * Mahon regards poetry as the creation of art out of words. For Mahon style is more important than theme. * Mahon’s poems come across to the readers as pronouncements. His speakers impart the poems as a kind of oration. They expound.
Derek Mahon - Plays
Site http://www.irishplayography.com/search/person.asp?PersonID=2200
Derek Mahon was born in Belfast in 1941, studied at Trinity College, Dublin and the Sorbonne, and has held academic and journalistic appointments in Dublin, London and New York. He worked for some years as a screenwriter, specialising in the adaptation of Irish novels for television. He has been theatre critic for The Listener, poetry editor of the New Statesman, features editor of Vogue and a regular contributor to The Irish Times for which he wrote a weekly book column (1986-89). A member of Aosdána and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the New York Institute for the Humanities, he has been the recipient of numerous awards including the C.K. Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize and Lannan and Guggenheim fellowships.
Derek Mahon - Penguin
Site http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,1000020717,00.html
Derek Mahon was born in Belfast in 1941, studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and the Sorbonne, and has held journalistic and academic appointments in London and New York. His recent publications include The Hudson Letter (1995), The Yellow Book (1997) and Collected Poems (1999).
Derek Mahon - NYRB
Site http://www.nybooks.com/nyrb/authors/11093
Derek Mahon was born in Belfast in 1941, studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and the Sorbonne, and has held journalistic and academic appointments in London and New York. He has received numerous awards, including the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Poetry Prize, the Irish Academy of Letters Award, the Scott Moncrieff and Aristeion translation prizes, and Lannan and Guggenheim fellowships. His Collected Poems were published in 1999 and Harbour Lights, a volume of new poetry, is forthcoming in 2005.
Derek Mahon - Liffey Project
Site http://www.liffeyproject.net/content/showthread.php?s=&threadid=621
Derek Mahon's Collected Poems was published by the Gallery Press in 1999. His translation of Birds by Saint-John Perse was published in 2002. Cyrano de Bergarac (The Gallery Press, 2004), a version of the French classic, was commissioned by the National Theatre, London. His screenplays include Summer Lightning [based on Turgenev's First Love] (RTÉ/Channel 4, 1985), and his prose is collected as Journalism (The Gallery Press, 1996). His honors include the Irish American Foundation Award, a Lannan Foundation Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Irish Times/Aer Lingus Poetry Prize, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award,The C.K. Scott Moncreiff Translation Prize for his translation of The Selected Poems of Philippe Jaccottet, and the Eric Gregory Award. He is a member of Aosdána, and lives in Dublin.
"We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence."
W. B. Yeats, speech in the Irish Senate, June 11, 1925