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4 9 R I N T H E T I M E T H A T R E M A I N S R E F L E C T I O N S O N T H E P O E T R Y O F D E R E K M A H O N O A N A S A N Z I A N A M A R I A N I wonder if a time could ever come when human life, relieved of ego and finance, might thrive on the mere fact of existence. —‘‘Rising Late’’ Derek Mahon has responded to every letter I ever sent him. Our first exchange was in 2002, while I was writing an undergraduate thesis on his long poetic sequence ‘‘The Hudson Letter’’ (now retitled ‘‘New York Time’’). I wrote to his agent, and, a week or so later, he phoned New Haven from Dublin. Only he’d reversed the time zones; the landline rang at 5 a.m., my groggy roommate knocked and said, ‘‘The gentleman on the line says he’s Derek Mahon. Isn’t that your poet?’’ We spoke, properly, later – I can’t recall what about. I wrote again the following summer from the Synge House on Inishmaan, or, rather, the cottage where the playwright John Millington Synge had gone a hundred years before me, at W. B. Yeats’s suggestion, to learn Irish. Derek’s reply was a postcard from Keats’s House, and it said he was in London. We met for co√ee at the Groucho Club a few weeks later. For most of my life I’ve been led by poems and poets and poetry, 5 0 M A R I A N Y and I see now how poetry o√ered me a kind of ordering principle for living, maybe even a map for integrating experience into something like insight: what religion might have done, but didn’t. In this instance, however, I mean ‘‘led’’ rather literally. I studied Anglo-Irish poetry in college, initially, because an artist I’d fallen for wrote out Seamus Heaney’s ‘‘To a Dutch Potter in Ireland’’ by hand on lovely paper. It was a meditation on what survives violence (in this case, the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940), and it was also the most erotic poem I’d ever read: Like wet daylight Or viscous satin under the felt and frieze Of humus layers. The true diatomite Discovered in a little sucky hole, Grey-blue, dull-shining, sticky, touchable – Mahon’s poetry had a di√erent quality, cooler, weirder. His most famous poem, ‘‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford,’’ digs, too, but instead of turning soil, as in Heaney’s earthbound rural scene in (maybe his most famous poem) ‘‘Digging,’’ Mahon gets underneath ‘‘a burnt-out hotel / Among the bathtubs and the washbasins ’’ and – but who would see this coming? – commemorates forgotten victims of Treblinka and Pompeii through the perspective of a thousand mushrooms crowded around light passing through a keyhole. The poem asks: What should they do there but desire? So many days beyond the rhododendrons With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud, They have learnt patience and silence Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood. Not as squirmy-sexy as ‘‘a little sucky hole,’’ desire in ‘‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’’ proliferates in absence, under the cover of neglect, with life happening somewhere, within earshot, but at an immutable distance. Indeed, Mahon has admitted in an interview with Eamon Grennan that the poem contains another unarticulated desire: to bridge another immutable distance, between the poet and the need to speak to the violence in the North during the Troubles. I N T H E T I M E T H A T R E M A I N S 5 1 R Poetry is ‘‘not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it’s an instrument for embodied experience,’’ says Adrienne Rich. ‘‘But,’’ she continues, ‘‘we seek that experience, or recognize it when it is o√ered to us, because it reminds us in some way of our need. After a rearousal of desire, the task of...

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