'Not the least of our losses in this plague year was one of our greatest poets, Derek Mahon. Washing Up is a glorious late harvest — vigorous, funny, angry, blithe — beautifully produced, like all Gallery editions, and including, appropriately, a lovely tribute to another luminary of the dead poets’ society, Ciaran Carson. Mahon’s last is vividly alive. '— John Banville, Sunday Independent(Books of the Year)
'Washing Up is the culmination of a life dedicated to language, the final word from an extraordinary talent, the once ‘strange child with a taste for verse’—a parting gift . . . there is a knowingly ironic sensibility on display in the collection. But there is hope, too. The book ends with ‘Word to the Wise’, a comradely address to President Michael D. Higgins that meanders through discussion of the statesman’s achievements, the challenges facing Ireland, and the challenges facing people across the globe, ‘at this critical time / of world coercion, multinational crime / the feral capitalism and climate change / so many take as only natural.’ A grim tableau no doubt, but, the poem tells us, things don’t have to be this way. A different future is possible: ‘Strange, / only the imagination can set us right / and that means poetry, some version of it.’ The dreadful irony, of course, is that these lines are taken from the last new Derek Mahon poem in the last new Derek Mahon book we’ll ever read. The world goes on waltzing in its bowl of cloud, and although it has lost this remarkable poet, it is the richer for having his poems in it. They might even help to set us right.' — Tara McEvoy, The Stinging Fly
Derek Mahon’s Washing Up reviewed by Ken Evans
If not in exile exactly, more Roman ‘relegatio’ like Ovid, who retained a house in the ancient city despite banishment, nevertheless, Mahon living out his last years on the coast in Kinsale, has something of a renunciation about it, for a cosmopolitan poet who lived in the USA and France. But unlike Ovid who felt, we are told, intellectually undernourished in his Black Sea backwater, far from the cultured company he was used to, drawn from poetry, theatre, politics and the arts, Mahon discovers much to enjoy in the green, coastal enclave that he knew well.
In ‘Washing Up’, the poet savours, in ‘Around the Town’, the man he calls, ‘Stephen, the local schizo, who calls out / quietly to the tourists, ‘Why don’t you lot / go home?’ Or Joseph, the beachcomber, in ‘Among the Rocks’, ‘who spends his days / sitting among the rocks and the rock pools / absorbed in his own thoughts, his own schedules… a bodhisattva or a Desert Father / for whom this life is only a glum phase.’ These two personae feel classic Mahon projections; the first, a candidly offensive raconteur-provocateur, rude as he likes to an overspill of the crass, as exemplified for him, in this instance, by a tourist crowd; but also a contemplative, reflective seeker of spiritual solace, in his own ‘glum phase.’ In ‘After Swift’ city-life leaves behind another Mahon alter ego, ‘a truculent, bewildered guest/at launch parties, art openings,/poetry nights and other things/where folks demand continually/’Please can you sign a book for me?’
This being Mahon’s last collection, we are tempted to search for glib sureties about a newly gained, but hard-earned, wisdom, or at least, a benign acceptance of a full life led. Mahon does get close to suggesting this at times. In the title poem, ‘Washing Up’ (with its layered meanings of ‘lost’, ‘finished’ and ‘cleansed’), the poet’s ability to find ‘the sacramental in the ordinary’, as Paul Muldoon characterised Mahon’s work upon his death last year, Mahon does arrive at the transcendental in the everyday, a characteristic in his work at least as early as the well anthologised, ‘Courtyard in Delft’ (written in 1981), with its 17th century Dutch domestic scenes overlaid with his own Belfast beginnings, son of a Harland & Wolff shipfitter. In the poem, the stars ‘find a widower…a relic of pre-digital times, / fond of anachronistic rhymes, / in flight from the new politique…washed up on a deserted beach / grumpy, contrarian, out of reach.’
Mahon is literally washing up, ‘watching the soap bubbles blink’, and finding some solace in, ‘The best of miracles rely / on the old, known reality – / pines where the wood pigeons live, / wild garlic growing in the drive, / the nightly fun of wiping dry / dishes and bowls and cutlery.’ Muldoon says Mahon writes with a ‘jaunty gloom’ but always ends on an upbeat, an uptick of mood or insight. However, it often feels much more ambivalent, ambiguous and multi-layered, rather than anything as simplistic as straightforward consolation, or alternatively, deep pessimism. Even while he extols the joys of a mundane house chore, where he ‘stacks the plates with diligence,/ glad to have been of use for once,’ he steps outside the house to the blind and elemental, ‘to watch the sea/ washing up the estuary.’
Blake Morrison critiqued Mahon, saying he lost some expressive vigour in favour of adherence to formal qualities of rhyme and metre, that the man who had the technical audacity to rhyme, in his words, ‘catalogues’ with ‘dogs’, somehow preferred traditional pattern to forceful expression. His ability, especially when using a favourite Yeatsian ottava rima (though much more loosely than W.B), to ‘push the sense of the sentence right round the corner of the lines’ (as Muldoon says of him), is exemplified in the first poem in the collection, ‘The Old Place.’ The eight-line stanzas of eleven syllables straitjacket of the form is subtly adulterated, and played with. Muldoon thinks in this poem Mahon ‘shows the rest of us how to a manage a stanza.’
I love the idea of Mahon ‘managing a stanza’, as if the poets’ job of work is as a crafter-grafter, with hints too, of a proficiently competent high street shop manager, ensuring footfall circulates in the right direction around the displays, the shop is well-stocked, well-lit, warm and laid-out in best order to show off its wares, with the suited manager constantly on hand, attentive to his ‘customer’/reader. On the shopfloor, Mahon leads from the front by invigorating an old form with grounded, everyday language that allows the rhymes to discreetly propel the lines, while leaving the reader relatively unaware of the artifice that is engaging, structuring and directing, their attention (at least on first reading.)
‘The Old Place’ is almost an elegy for lost youth, addressed to two younger relatives/friends’ children, perhaps? The end-line rhymes in the first stanza ‘longer/rabbits/exams/when/stronger/habits/games/then,’ suggest a little of the craft, with full-on rhymes of ‘longer/stronger’ and ‘rabbits/habits,’ then a subtler off-rhyme thrown in to ‘soften’ the overt chimes, like ‘exams’ and ‘games’. This is developed in stanza two, with ‘ill-at-ease’ matched with ‘exercise’ and ‘writing table’ with ‘notable.’ This language allows for great directness of diction, within the ottava rima scheme, as well as fluidity in the sometimes emphasised, and sometimes veiled, rhyming.
Mahon perhaps comes closest in this poem to a self-portrait with ‘the old author… / framed in the window at his writing-table / …. a sort of hermit, working not for profit, / who was content to engage those few notable / readers who saw the point of the exercise.’
This is pure Mahon, self-deprecating and wry, yet I hope and trust, at the end, well aware of his unique voice that reached many, across five decades of what he would have scoffed at being called his ‘oeuvre,’ while at the same time, in all likelihood, correcting one’s pronunciation of the French, ever ‘le plongeur sans pareil.’
— Ken Evans, The High Window
Washing Up by Derek Mahon
Darken our blinding light a bit
and turn the volume down so we can hear
ourselves thinking, if we’ve a taste for thought;
even now the obscure silences might survive
where an original thought can thrive.
These are the final lines of ‘Radiance’, a new poem that arrives about halfway through Derek Mahon’s final, posthumously published collection Washing Up. Readers will hear in them an echo of his best-known work, the virtuoso, unforgettable ‘A Disused Shed in County Wexford’, specifically the line with which that poem begins: ‘Even now there are places where a thought might grow’. The impulse, in ‘Radiance’, is the same, but it is expressed differently. Where ‘A Disused Shed’ was a kind of allegorical opus, a conversation with victims of suffering throughout history—‘Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii’—in the latter poem Mahon turns his attention to contemporary concerns, ‘airports and sports facilities, hi-tech premises’, to the accelerating pace of daily life. Published forty-five years apart, these two poems are testament to Mahon’s lifelong project of finding a space for the imagination and protecting that space. That the poet managed to do so—in the face of the violence of the Troubles, in the face of decades of personal and political strife, in the face of illness—is no small thing. What is even more remarkable is the fruit of that imagination: the corpus of poems, essays, and plays with which he leaves us, a corpus that confirms him as one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. And now, we have a new addition to that body of work with Washing Up, a collection that surveys the poet’s life and influences; ruminates on our present moment; anticipates an unforeseeable future.
In addition to being written in Mahon’s unmistakable idiom, the collection also returns to familiar themes. The natural world is an enduring concern, as might be gleaned from a cursory perusal of the contents page: poems include ‘Natural Resources’, ‘Natural Selection’, ‘Sand’, ‘Open Air’, ‘Among the Rocks’, ‘Algae’, ‘Down in the Woods’, ‘Another Cold Spring’, and ‘Winter Garden’. The book showcases the poet’s hallmark formal dexterity, too. It includes diary extracts, translations, verse letters, and a poignant, joyful elegy for his old friend Ciaran Carson. And it begins with the bravura ottava rima of ‘The Old Place’, a tender address (‘for Hugo and Eliza Duff’) to two children who might want to read it, the poet hopes, some day when they’re all grown up. ‘It will be time enough to read it then’, Mahon writes,
and recall, briefly, the old author of it
framed in the window at his writing table
who was at peace here in a world ill-at-ease
with itself, its past, a future yours to know—
a sort of hermit, working not for profit,
who was content to engage those few notable
readers who saw the point of the exercise.
You’ve other things on your mind, but even so.
Here as elsewhere in Washing Up, Mahon’s characteristic self-deprecating wit enlivens the poem, but it’s tempered by the earnestness that becomes increasingly prevalent in his later work, where clarity of vision is coupled with a newfound (apparent) peace of mind. He once noted that no sensitive person could help but feel like a tourist in their own country, but now it seems like he has—at last—found a home. ‘A sort of hermit’? Yes and no. The poet might be somewhat isolated from the world beyond the window, but he has hardly shut it out; he remains attentive to its goings-on. These poems consider ‘strip mining and data mining’, ‘faux-democracies’, ‘the high-tech requisition of real lives’. They consider the Covid-19 pandemic, and the resultant Irish lockdown, ‘this enforced parenthesis’. But, to my mind, the most affecting poems in the book are those that ruminate on illness, death, and the survival of artistic work. Sometimes, these themes are approached from an angle. ‘Nacht und Träume’ reflects on the death of Schubert: ‘you wrote fast to fill with love / the night-time skies’ acoustic void / in the short time you had to live / before your final winter ride’; the epistolary ‘Byron to Moore’ imagines the former dispensing advice to his peer: ‘Someone will say you make a music-box / of the wild harp, but never mind such folks: / think of the thousands who will keep your line / a-singing, and the lamp lit at your shrine’; ‘Oedipus at Colonus’ gives new voice to an old character: ‘Death awaits us at the end of the road; / only in death are we beyond catastrophe.’ Other poems strike a more personal note. The poem which lends the collection its title, ostensibly concerned with the everyday act of washing up, also meditates on what it is to be washed up, a self-portrait of the poet as ‘a relic of pre-digital times / fond of anachronistic rhymes’. Similarly, ‘Around the House’ holds the domestic and the existential in tension: ‘bed is for rehearsing / the song the angels sing / since time must have a stop.’ The moving, funny ‘An Old Theme’ is more direct still:
I shall die soon enough on a windy night
not quietly but furious at the outrage,
kicking and screaming as the lights go out.
Never mind; contributing my own calcium
to the world soup with rosemary, sage
and thyme, I will have time to come
to terms with the elemental afterlife—
grimly, of course, if not without relief.
The loss that Mahon anticipates here—his own death—is huge. Last year, as lockdown was introduced, an old poem of his called ‘Everything Is Going To Be Alright’ attracted a good deal of attention: going viral on social media, read out on the RTÉ news, performed by the actor Andrew Scott. First published in the late 1970s, readers now looked to it anew as a source of comfort, a reprieve from the ambient fear the Coronavirus had provoked. RTÉ called it ‘a poem for our times’. People described it using words like ‘soothing’ and ‘uplifting’. There were those who read in it, in fact, a kind of blithe optimism. This is how it begins, after all: ‘How should I not be glad to contemplate / the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window / and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?’ The lines which follow, however, have always seemed to me to deflate the poem, to undermine any contention that things are going to work out fine: ‘There will be dying, there will be dying / but there is no need to go into that.’ That was that, I thought: the whole poem was a kind of dark joke. Not blithely optimistic but a send-up of blithe optimism. When I went back to it, though, it struck me that I’d misread the poem too. It might have been a joke, but it wasn’t only that. In spite of its cynicism, there is beauty here, as well: ‘The sun rises in spite of everything / and the far cities are beautiful and bright.’ Not optimism, but—to recognise the distinction made by Václav Havel—maybe something like hope. It occurred to me then that Mahon’s are the kind of poems with which one spends a lifetime, the kind of poems that might reveal themselves to you over years: wrongfooting you, surprising you, delighting you. The best of them are poems not only ‘for our times’ but for all times, for all seasons.
All this renewed interest in ‘Everything Is Going to Be Alright’ came before its author passed away, and before the publication of Washing Up, and all this was on my mind as I began this review. How to write about a poet whose work so many hold dear, how to write about a book when it’s a last book? Is it possible—is it even desirable—to write about such a collection in isolation, to gloss over the context for it? Perhaps not. For Washing Up is the culmination of a life dedicated to language, the final word from an extraordinary talent, the once ‘strange child with a taste for verse’—a parting gift. Just as in the poem that garnered lockdown fame, there is a knowingly ironic sensibility on display in the collection. But there is hope, too. The book ends with ‘Word to the Wise’, a comradely address to President Michael D. Higgins that meanders through discussion of the statesman’s achievements, the challenges facing Ireland, and the challenges facing people across the globe, ‘at this critical time / of world coercion, multinational crime / the feral capitalism and climate change / so many take as only natural.’ A grim tableau no doubt, but, the poem tells us, things don’t have to be this way. A different future is possible: ‘Strange, / only the imagination can set us right / and that means poetry, some version of it.’ The dreadful irony, of course, is that these lines are taken from the last new Derek Mahon poem in the last new Derek Mahon book we’ll ever read. The world goes on waltzing in its bowl of cloud, and although it has lost this remarkable poet, it is the richer for having his poems in it. They might even help to set us right.
— Tara McEvoy, The Stinging Fly
Books of the Year 2020
At the time of his death in October, Derek Mahon was the greatest living writer in English, whose talent had been fostered by the patient dedication of Peter Fallon’s Gallery Press. — Richard Davenport-Hines, Times Literary Supplement
Washing Up (Gallery Press) contains Derek Mahon’s last poems, fashioned and unfashionable. Published shortly after his death in October this year, the book takes the long view, as Mahon so often has. More surprisingly, perhaps, it offers a hopeful and partisan vision anchored in the power of the imagination to “work strange miracles.” The defining poem is the last one, Word to the Wise, addressed to Irish president Michael Higgins, a poet and a friend. In rhyming couplets, it scans a jeopardised future, where everything is nonetheless still to be gained — if the bold Cubans could do it, why not us? — Leonie Rushforth, The Morning Star
Heather Clark’s magisterial biography, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath a dense and hugely significant book; a personal and artistic universe rendered with commitment and sympathy but shunning sentimentality. This is also true of Derek Mahon’s final volume of poetry Washing Up. He would have been eighty next year but his death earlier this year robs us of a truly great poet though the poems will remain as his abiding testament to the power of art to overcome each and every kind of obstacle; a superb collection from one of the modern masters.’ — Gerald Dawe, The Lonely Crowd
. . . This dream-like wonder is an attribute of much of the work published this year. Sadly, we lost the great poets Eavan Boland and Derek Mahon. They wrote until the end, both publishing important posthumous collections. Mahon’s Washing Up (Gallery Press, €12.50pb/€18.50hb) contains poems of the pandemic with Quarantine, and A Fox in Grafton Street and an elegy to Ciaran Carson. — Paul Perry, Sunday Independent
The deaths of Eavan Boland and Derek Mahon have left a void in the lives of their readers. Both completed a new collection of poetry before they died – Eavan Boland’s is The Historians; Derek Mahon’s is Washing Up – and both books make clear what marvellous poets they are. The first poem in Boland’s book, The Fire Gilder, is one of the best Irish poems of the past half-century. In Mahon’s book, wry wisdom and an autumnal tone are governed by a magisterial control of the line and the stanza. — Colm Tóibín, The Irish Times
Not the least of our losses in this plague year was one of our greatest poets, Derek Mahon. Washing Up (Gallery Press) is a glorious late harvest — vigorous, funny, angry, blithe — beautifully produced, like all Gallery editions, and including, appropriately, a lovely tribute to another luminary of the dead poets’ society, Ciaran Carson. Mahon’s last is vividly alive. — John Banville, Sunday Independent
Publication Date: 29 October 2020
Details: 96pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 91133 790 4
ISBN HBK: 978 1 91133 791 1
Cover: ‘A5.20’ by Charles Tyrrell, oil on aluminium,
