Derek Mahon

Archipelago is one of the most important and influential literary magazines of the last twenty years. Running to twelve editions, it was edited by Andrew McNeillie, with the assistance later of James McDonald Lockhart, and began as an attempt to reimagine the relationships between the islands of Ireland and Britain. Archipelago has brought together established and emerging artists in creative conversations that have transformed the study of islands, coasts and waterways. It journeys from the Shetlands to Cornwall, from the Aran Islands to the coast of Yorkshire, tracing the cultures of diverse zones through some of the best in contemporary writing about place and people. This collection gathers poetry, prose and visual art in clusters grouped around the Irish and British archipelago, with contributions from an array of significant artists. It includes newly commissioned work as well as an interview between Andrew McNeillie and Robert Macfarlane on the development of Archipelago across the years.

New Selected Poems is a book of singular abundance and formal verve, featuring poems of rare vision and dramatic power by a consummate and resilient artist. Demonstrating the wide range of Derek Mahon's verse, from the early lyricism to a more expansive middle period ('New York Time', 'Decadence') and the flowering of his late style, it includes recent, uncollected work and culminates in the generous, far-reaching reverie 'Dreams of a Summer Night'.

In The Yellow Book, the home-seeking traveler--"a decadent who lived to tell the story"--finds lodgings in our fierce fin de si cle under the roof of his Dublin attic flat. Amid echoes from dead writers, "clouds of unknowing" from his "last Camel," and ghosts from his own life, the poet muses wisely and wittily on our wound-down decade and expiring double millennium. These twenty-one absorbing, sometimes mordantly funny, and always delightful meditations offer us both the distinctive details of our shared lives and a theoptic view from "windows flung wide on briny balconies/above an ocean of roofs and lighthouse beams;/like a storm lantern the wintry planet swings." ("Night Thought")

Mahon writes from lower Manhattan, addressing, in ramble or vigil, his absent lover, his children in London, Auden, Yeats's father, and other cosmic vagrants, "clutching our bits and pieces, arrogant in dereliction." In the eighteen sections of "The Hudson Letter," the gabble of a dockside bar, voices of a recycled Sappho and of an Irish immigrant girl reassuring her mother in Inishannon, and the midwinter, all-night sounds of the City intersperse with the voice of the poet--lively, witty, poignant, elegiac, humane, and thoroughly human. "The Hudson Letter" is prefaced by four new poems in different voices.