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, then on to the Sorbonne. Heaney left the North for residence in Dublin and professorships at Harvard and Oxford, but his work is justly noted for its rootedness in the rural world of his childhood. Mahon has lived outside Ireland for years at a time, working in London as a journalist and screenwriter.

Ireland over the past few decades has been the breeding ground for a dozen or so notable poets.

During his London years he was variously theater critic for The Listener, poetry editor of the New Statesman, and features editor at Vogue. His career in England somewhat