Ireland over the past few decades has been the breeding ground for a dozen or so notable poets. One of them, Seamus Heaney, has become world-renowned, and rightly so. But equally worthy of attention is Derek Mahon, born in 1941, two years later than the Nobel Laureate. He has not been, until recently, especially prolific: his carefully winnowed Selected Poems (1991, now out of print) contains most of the essential early Mahon; his two most recent individual volumes, The Hudson Letter (1995) and The Yellow Book (1997),[1] are fresh, witty, and often coruscating, at once classic and demotic.

Like Heaney, Mahon was born and raised in Northern Ireland. Unlike his more celebrated contemporary, he is city-bred—a native of Belfast—and he is culturally a Protestant. While Heaney attended Queens University in Belfast, Mahon went south to Dublin, where he studied at Trinity College, th ...

This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchase