Peter McDonald reviews Harbour Lights by Derek Mahon

In "The Cloud Ceiling", a poem celebrating the birth of a daughter relatively late in his middle age, Derek Mahon allows himself some reflection on the changes in his writing life:

I who, though soft-hearted, always admired
granite and blackthorn and the verse hard-wired,
tingle and flow like January thaw-water
in contemplation of this rosy daughter.

"Hard-wired" is less technical (probably) than it is metaphorical here; and certainly, Mahon's own verse has often - especially early in his career - been hard-wired with the formal structures and instincts which made possible poetry of enormous clarity, memorability, and imaginative exactness. One suspects that Mahon's admiration for the hard and the sharp remains as strong as ever; but other kinds of poetry, like other kinds of feeling, are nowadays more liable to intrude. The lines here themselves illustrate this, with the seemingly bathetic (in terms of rhyme and phrasing, however uplifting and bracing the reality it records) "contemplation of this rosy daughter". Mahon immediately adds, as though aware of the sentimentality all around him, the injunction to "Be patient with an old bloke" (who " probably won't be here when you've grown up", as the last line says), and asks the infant to

remember later
one who, in his own strange, distracted youth
awake to the cold stars for the harsh truth,
now tilts a bottle to your open mouth.

It's the image of the bottle-feeding (and nappy-changing) "old bloke" which the poet most wants to bequeath, and not that of the "distracted youth" and his "hard-wired" verses.

One easy reaction to all this is to deride the sentimentality, and deplore the mis-valuing (by the poet himself) of one of the most valuable poetic voices of the last fifty years. But such a snap judgement might be unwise, and perhaps itself a form of shallow critical sentimentality. "The Cloud Ceiling" is, after all, not exactly a naïve literary document: its situation mirrors that of W.B. Yeats's "A Prayer for my Daughter" (Yeats was in his mid-fifties when his daughter was born), and its form, of six, irregularly rhymed ten-line stanzas, echoes (while distorting) that of Yeats's more regularly stanzaic poem. Where Yeats sets out to equip his daughter for life in an apocalyptically-charged and doom-laden modern world, her cradle in the cold Anglo-Norman surroundings of Thoor Ballylee, against a background of storm and tempest, Mahon sets the cradle in an altogether more reassuring suburbia:

After a night of iron-dark, unmoving skies
you open your eyes; we too open our eyes
on a clear day where hedgerow and high-rise
swivel deliriously round your baby-bed
in the attic studio where you lie safe
like yin and yang in your own secret life.
Sunlight streams like April at the window;
sky-flocks graze above your dreaming head.
Life is a dream, of course, as we all know,
but one to be dreamt in earnest even so.

Verse like this is relaxed, but it is very far from spineless. The last couplet turns the tables on some of Yeats's more grandiose and rhetorical ways of clinching a matter; but, while deflating this kind of thing, Mahon's poetry here still convincingly means what it says. Life, in Harbour Lights, is emphatically something to be "lived in earnest", and Mahon's poetry is now tuned more deliberately to life than to the kind of art which might seek to go beyond "life".

The relation to Yeats is obvious, but this is not a matter of po-faced intensity for Mahon, or something thrown in to keep the attention of academic critics. In fact, there is a lightness about the many Yeatsian allusions in Harbour Lights which is in keeping with the general relaxation of literary manners in Mahon's later work. Yeats's late poem, "Lapis Lazuli", with its claim that "All things fall and are built again", furnishes Mahon with a useful point of reference for his own - altogether less innocent - poetic modernity (or rather post-modernity):

But everything is noticed, everything known
in the "knowledge era", advertised as the one
without precedent; though in late middle age,
striving to tame the Yeatsian lust and rage,
I claim now the disgraceful privilege
of living part-time in a subversive past:
".fall and are built again"; nor is this the last,
for the tough nuts, imagining you fortunate,
will aim to get you with their curious hate.

These lines, from the title-poem, take on board (without naming) the tragic gaiety late Yeats recommends ("All things fall and are built again/ And those that build them again are gay"), and Mahon's determination to exercise "the disgraceful privilege/ of living part-time in a subversive past" is now partly a way of facing down. or wrong-footing, those "tough nuts" whose insistent present time that past subverts.

Mahon (cheekily enough) has his own poem entitled "Lapis Lazuli": Yeats's poem of that title carried a dedication to a 1930s artist called Harry Clifton; and the existence of a contemporary Irish writer of the same name has been too great a temptation for Mahon to avoid - Harbour Lights, like Yeats's 1938 New Poems, features the item "Lapis Lazuli (for Harry Clifton)". The joke is a good one, even if it feels rather too inevitable. The poem, however, is far better than the joke, and it is among the most assured and successful pieces in the book. Mahon's view of the contemporary world is every bit as grim as Yeats's, and in its way just as apocalyptic, as "planes that consume deserts of gasoline/ darken the sun in another rapacious war"; but his version the sages" laughing gaiety in the face of tragedy (of the first "Lapis Lazuli") is a convincingly-put question:

Do we die laughing or are we among those
for whom a spectre, some discredited ghost
still haunts the misty windows of old hopes?

Like the "subversive past" from which Mahon's imagination operates, this "discredited ghost" does a good deal of haunting in the book It is, perhaps, the ghost of literary tradition (amongst other things), ill-at-ease in the world into which Derek Mahon has lived.

Harbour Lights has by no means, however, given up on the "old hopes" to which literary tradition connects - with which, indeed, it is basically "hard-wired". The book's key-notes are resilience and affirmation; and these things are to be found both in the recurring themes (notably "the redemptive power of women", celebrated in the remarkable reworking of Homer, "Calypso") and in the strong, tightly-sprung, verse forms through which they are expressed. Sometimes, it is true, Mahon can find himself stating the obvious and defending the good in a register that resembles Louis MacNeice at his worthiest but least exciting; but the poetry contains, even so, enough low-key, humanistic (and humane) wisdom to keep the more strident ghost of Yeats safely at bay.

Mahon's previous two volumes, The Hudson Letter and The Yellow Book, were at best uneven affairs, and at worst seemed to mark the serious decay of one of contemporary poetry's most extraordinary and valuable talents. The verse had slouched into (by and large) a mannered flippancy, usually in rhythmically inert couplet form, while the poetry's content had diminished to a stream of grumbles and shorthand cultural reference. In my own review of The Yellow Book (in Poetry Ireland Review 56 (Spring 1998)), I subjected Mahon to the kind of criticism which doubtless consigned me to the ranks of the "tough nuts" in the poet's estimation. Given this, it is a real pleasure to find in Harbour Lights so much of the original Mahon, and so little self-pastiche. Some of the poems here are among his very best - especially "Lucretius on Clouds", "During the War", "Shorelines", "New Wave", and "Calypso": and, considering how good Mahon at his best can be, this is no mean praise. It would be a good thing for Mahon to be re-absorbed into the bloodstream of young poets, and Harbour Lights, along with a good half of his Collected Poems, would make marvellously productive reading for anyone alert to poetry's distinctiveness and irony in the contemporary world. With its triumphant return to form, Harbour Lights is certainly the best news the "poetry scene" has had for a long time.

Harbour Lights (Gallery Books, £12.99)

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