Derek Mahon’s rich new collection turns its wide-angled lens on a ‘dozy seaside town’ in County Cork, four fellow Ulster poets, a bicycle shop in Delhi and the volcanic origins of the Canary Islands, against the background of a ‘cascading world economy’. Alive to the current climate, it also revisits Chinese poetry of the T’ang era and explores that of modern India in the work of the fictitious Hindi poet Gopal Singh.

This is the work of a contemporary great, one who dreams that the world be re-enchanted, so that

we look to the still living whole
to heal the heart and cure the soul.

Published: 26 March 2010