Eilan NChuilleanin Ironic, literate, alert, Mahon was the poet who most directly and fruitfully drew on the inheritance of Louis MacNeice. President Michael D Higgins News of the death of Derek Mahon will be received with great sadness by his colleagues in Aosdna but also, and more widely, by those who understand what the loss of a great poet, with a body of work such as his, entails. He was the first man to put in a discreet good word for any young poet. Justin used to tiptoe around the stacks in Mahons wake, trying to see what the writer in residence had just been perusing. When he is writing about Portrush or County Wexford the poems breathe a large atmosphere; when he looks at Goa or New York they keep an intimate grip. His books, benchmarks each and every one, will live on for as long as people are interested in the art and force of poetry. I told this once to Justin Quinn and Justin admitted that he used to do exactly the same in the Trinity library. Derek Mahon at home in Kinsale, Co. Cork in 2010. And now, though Derek himself has gone beyond words, we have his poems, the bounty, the gift, of their words. Eilan N Chuilleanin, former Ireland Professor of Poetry, tells presenter Olivia OLeary about finding a number of poems on his computer after the death of her husband, Macdara Woods, in 2018. Susan McKay He has vanished where the lane turns, the last of the fire kings. I told him I wanted to write poetry. Or art. I too lived there as a child, where there is Derek Mahons poems. And that is what makes all the more moving his extraordinarily affirmative poem, Everything is Going to Be All Right, which has offered many of us consolation this year. Almost exactly 52 years ago I reviewed his first collection Night-Crossing in the Irish Times (September 30th, 1968). I met him only twice, once in London, once in Dun Laoghaire, a low-key figure in a suit and trainers, reluctantly present for some event, but friendly. He was a great reviser, sometimes ditching lines that as a reader I was fond of, but his insistence on unshowy craft was exemplary. The Poetry Programme,Sundays from 11th October at 7:30 pm on RT Radio 1 - listen back here. President Michael D Higgins has led tributes to the poet Derek Mahon, who died at his home in Kinsale last night, aged 78. I still remember the sunny day I bought his 1993 Selected Poems in Kennys Bookshop, and how I fell for it, sitting in the Claddagh with the Corrib roaring by as I read, I must be lying low in a room there,/ a strange child with a taste for verse, / while my hard-nosed companions dream of war/ on parched veldt and fields of rainswept gorse., The poems are a wonder, conjuring unforgettable lines and images, and such sweeping panoramas. Colette Bryce is the editor ofPoetry Ireland Review. But in the new century he turned back to the lyric form with the fine volume Harbour Lights (2006). A poem like The Globe in North Carolina (which Ive just re-read), its scope and elegance, never fails to astonish me. Or history. Her family was strongly Republican and Eilan felt a strong sense of nationalistic pride. He was Maestro. The offhand cosmopolitanism, the breadth of reference, the plangeant incandescent precision of the work. Like polished marble, his couplets and quatrains will last a thousand years. You should receive instructions for resetting your password. Derek could be wickedly hilarious company. Well it must be just great to be famous, he said to me, laughing, as we sat in the Long Valley bar drinking a pot of tea. We need your consent to load this SoundCloud content. HerSelected Poemsis published by Picador. In the 1990s Mahon produced a remarkable set of satiric verse epistles, including The Hudson Letter (1995) and The Yellow Book (1997). 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