In this, Derek Mahon's third collection since his Collected Poems (1999), he seeks to give contemporary moments more final shapes, but there is a sense of ancient ideas being made new: it is a poetry of metempsychosis. In James Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom explains the word to his wife, Molly, over breakfast (and just before those inner organs of beasts are burnt on the stove):

It is a pleasure to see how the later work of Mahon elaborates upon and explores this idea; one can trace it throughout his work, from an early poem like 'Lives' onwards, where gnomic, riddle-like utterance serves to exemplify the re-cyclical nature of things: 'First time out/ I was a torc of gold [...] Once I was an oar [...] I was a stone in Tibet'. This early poem pivots on the central midway phrase, 'So many lives,/ So many things to remember!', and his poetry can be read as a lyrical dialogue with the concept.

Metempsychosis is present in variegated forms across Mahon's work. From 'Lives' to another famous poem like 'Leaves', the desire for infinity sings out against the deleted world:

Somewhere there is an afterlife
Of dead leaves,
A stadium filled with an infinite
Rustling and sighing.

Somewhere in the heaven
Of lost futures
The lives we might have led
Have found their own fulfilment.

In 'The Apotheosis of Tins' the rubbish of the world is recycled into memento mori; 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford' gives us the metempsychosis of mushrooms muttering on behalf of lost peoples. Mahon closed his last collection, Life on Earth, with the karmic meditation 'Homage to Goa': 'A mozzie once myself, I buzzed and bit'. An Autumn Wind begins with the homecoming of 'Ithaca', and returns to themes of transmigration, but with a renewed synthesis of theme and lyric.

The book is in three sections: the first is rooted mainly in contemporary Ireland; in 'Part Two: River of Stars', Mahon gives versions from Chinese poets of the T'ang era, revisiting the spiritual territory of the earlier poem 'The Mayo Tao', and moving freely between the wine-loving Li T'ai Po (701-762) and the more intellectual Tu Fu (712-770). You would expect the volume to end here, with a version of Tu Fu's 'Autumn Fields': 'An Autumn wind shivers my walking stick/ but peace of mind resides in ferns, flowers,// music and daily habit for equilibrium'. Some of the poems in 'Part Three: Raw Material' are less convincing treatments of subjects explored more fully elsewhere. Direct treatment of theme is more successful here with Tao, rather than karma, particularly in 'The Thatched Hut', where ancient material is recycled with such freshness and clarity that they could apply to any reader alive in any time: 'I stand still/ in the long grass shining with recent rain/ as peace descends, startling the eye and ear/ to something like an ecstatic trance'.

'Part One' is haunted by climate change; there are poems on the occasions of other poets' birthdays, and poems sensitive to contemporary changes in Ireland and the world. 'Beached Whale' recalls Ted Hughes's 'October Salmon' in its thrilling geographia, where the vivid representation of natural things creates an illusion of reality: we have an underwater view of the whale in her prime 'whooping and chuckling in her slick and drip,/ stinking and scooping up the fry,/ rusty and barnacled like an old steamship'. Those swift rhymes give way to the pathos of her demise: 'Out of her depth now, her rorqual pleats/ivory fading to grey as the tide retreats'. In the surprising vocabulary, the sense of narrative and argument, the later work of Mahon is as virtuoso as ever. The end of the poem seeks to draw further comparisons among land and water mammals and shows how science might ensure the future life of the dead whale: 'she knows we aim to make a study of her; [...] her ancient knowledge of the seas and rocks/ we left to climb up on the burning shore/ and still revisit in dreams and sex'. She has changed into a laboratory specimen, but we too have transmigrated from ocean matter into scientists, and readers of poetry.

'A Building Site' describes not merely a convent being flattened and turned into flats. The subject is the deeper change of an Ireland where Catholicism has lost its relevance to the spiritual life of the people. The convent becomes a metonym, the singular part representing the whole religion. Half way through, the poem darts off in a new direction. The change is exciting as the deconstruction of the old 'site'

opens a special place,
a field of rough energy
suspended for a minute
not at an 'interface'
or even a 'cutting edge'

but at a spinning centre
of heightened consciousness [.]

This 'rough energy' sounds especially Shakespearean; a kind of 'rough magic' at the centre of the transmigration, where one thing becomes something new altogether. There is the belief in more ancient things, like this moment 'of heightened consciousness', at a moment where religion is losing its relevance.

In 'New Space', a writing studio clarifies the poet's thoughts and feelings, and ancient, abstract concepts like 'the soul', which some poets would not allow themselves to write about, are investigated through concrete objects:

The weight of a bone-handled knife
signifies more in human life
than our aesthetics ever can;
form follows function. Once again
we look to the still living whole
to heal the heart and cure the soul.

One might say this stanza is in dialogue with the 'Preface' from A Treatise on Poetry, by Czesław Miłosz. The famous closing lines of the Miłosz poem are as heavy and memorable as the image described:

And our regret has remained unconfessed.
Novels and essays serve but will not last.
One clear stanza can take more weight
Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose.

It was a matter of survival that Miłosz wrote, against totalitarianism, how 'plain speech in the mother tongue' is a thing of grace. In Mahon's poem, the lines are well made and singing, but the 'aesthetics' here seems double-edged. Is he referring to poetry itself, or to table-talk? An Autumn Wind is a book of tightly structured formal poems where form follows function, and full- and half- rhymes interlock so as not to wash out the sonic harmony. I would suggest he is outlining both the similarities and differences between the well-made knife and the well-made poem, praising both, and acknowledging that sometimes life is bigger than literature. The last stanza in 'New Space' also recalls the impossibility of choosing solely between art and life, something Yeats must have been aware of when he suggested one must 'choose/ Perfection of the life, or of the work': extremity is necessary for perfection, but why must one allow life or work to suffer permanently? The paradox is that one is constantly choosing between life and work, as poets choose between life and art, each thing informing the other, and that the choice replenishes its extremity every time.

The search for balance between life and art is present in Mahon's birthday poems for poet-friends, published originally by Gallery Press as broadsheet limited editions. In 'A Quiet Cottage', Mahon returns to Michael Longley's Carrigskeewaun as a site of redemptive sanctuary at the height of the Troubles, praising the lasting quality of Longley's work, 'the best thoughts survive/ decades of fear and hate', and assessing his own recent move to Kinsale, Cork. At the close of these meditations shared among Ulster poets of Mahon's generation (for Montague, Heaney and Longley, respectively), the note is particularly somber: 'Now we can die in peace'.

With three new volumes since his Collected, and Hugh Haughton's book-length study The Poetry of Derek Mahon (O.U.P., 2007), Mahon's stature can only grow. His work suggests that poetry is a kind metempsychosis, a way of transmigrating thoughts to the mind of the reader, a way of recycling knowledge, an inherited autumnal harvest to be stored up for the future.

Derek Mahon, An Autumn Wind, Gallery Press, 2010. £10.95. 978-1-852354-86-2

© Simon Pomery, 2010

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.