Citation for Life on Earth — from The Griffin Poetry Prize International Shortlist Awards Programme:

“Formal grace, uncluttered diction, and sprightliness of movement lend Derek Mahon’s new poems a musicality and memorability which is intensified by their visionary gaze and their poignant yearning for unspoiled and unsoiled places: ‘blue skies, /clear water, scattered light’. His light-filled work celebrates the sun’s life-sustaining powers; yet he also fears the heat of the sun in the context of global warming: ‘Sea levels rising annually, /glaciers sliding fast, /species extinct …’ Mahon is drawn to the lives, worlds and work of other artists; a vivid bio-poem, retracing Coleridge’s life, and an atmospheric poem evoking the post-war Belfast of the novelist Brian Moore are set alongside elegant versions of Ovid [the desolate ‘Ariadne on Naxos’] and Ibsen [the haunting and unsettling ‘The Lady from the Sea’]. Visual art features prominently too: a sequence of ‘Art Notes’ re-creates the paintings of Edward Hopper, Howard Hodgkin, René Magritte and others with meticulously-crafted mastery. An outstanding collection from one of Ireland’s most acclaimed poets."

Reviews

Derek Mahon is also reporting back in his new collection, Life on Earth, with its homages to the natural world, warnings against our ecological delinquency in a timeless future and praises for the comforts of local replenishment (in India and in Ireland) as in the suitably Audenesque At Ursula's , where 'we bow to our warm plates'.
                     — Gerald Dawe, The Irish Times Books of the Year

Another storm-tossed Greek on extended shore-leave from Kinsale to Goa is Derek Mahon, whose magical Life on Earth is an act of thanksgiving, a re-rooting of the self in the biosphere.
                                         — Harry Clifton, The Irish Times