Eco-Criticism and Derek Mahon’s ‘A Disused Shed in County Wexford’

Abstract

Eco-Criticism and Derek Mahon’s ‘A Disused Shed in County Wexford’ James McElroy A wide assortment of what might be called ‘eco-contradictions’ define Irish critical practice. These serve to fashion a critical notation that narrows or eliminates the significance of nature in Irish literature by forestalling any extended discussion of floral or faunal species variation. The net result is that ‘nature’ often ends up being hidden in plain sight. This is true of Mahon Studies, where nature as extra-textual other, or important poetic trope, has often been passed over in order to serve some of the more pressing ideological needs of Ireland’s critics. Such an optic guarantees (all but) that mainstream critical approaches remain locked inside, and fixated on, a stymied sense of ‘nature’, which only has to do with, and only finds its assertionist epistemological roots in, established topographical questions and answers. In a gradual and graduated departure from that ubiquitous metonym known as ‘the land’, this article will therefore pursue an eco-symptomatic reading that tries to identify some of the more egregious gaps, lapses and silences – aporiai – that have gone unmentioned in critical discourse because the idea of nature, as deployed in most Irish criticism, either sidelines or suppresses the very ‘nature’ it claims to open up for analysis. Derek Mahon, for his part, relishes the kind of serrated edge that defines the orientation of writers like John Montague, whose poetic he calls ‘explicitly ecological’ with reference to poems like ‘Hymn to the New Omagh Road’ and ‘Mount Eagle’.1 Praising Montague for his unabashed commitment to the environment, Mahon singles out another one of his eco-poems, ‘Demolition Ireland,’ not only because it rails against the wanton destruction of Ireland’s eco-habitats, and eco-inhabitants, but because it reinforces Mahon’s own closely held belief that it is often at the so-called edges and margins – borders – that nature asserts its inalienable right to be other than.2 ‘Demolition Ireland’ figures as an early paean to nature and ecology, a repudiation of man’s destructive tendencies when it comes to ‘riverbanks, so slowly, lushly formed, / haunt of the otter and waterhen, / bulldozed into a stern, straight Studies • volume 107 • number 426 215 line’, or, as Montague puts it a few lines later, such mindless destruction stands in open contrast to the ‘mysteries coiled in the tangled clefts / of weed and whin’ – the knowledge that rushes will ‘rise again, by stealth, / tireless warriors, on the earth’s behalf’. John Kerrigan feels it is important to point out that one of Ireland’s leading critics, Seamus Deane, dismissed these early ecological poems precisely because they tried to talk about, at times even dared to itemise, the loss of certain species of flora and fauna in verse. Kerrigan recounts how Deane insisted that Montague’s verse was really ‘ecology, not poetry’. He also recounts how Deane believed, at least when it came to poeticising nature, that Montague’s verse was ‘nothing more than a tract’. Kerrigan, in direct opposition to Deane, considers Montague to be an invaluable nature poet who, under the influence of everyone from Ted Hughes and Wendell Berry to Gary Snyder, established an unapologetic ecological politics concerning his home place and therein found it possible to imagine ‘potential links between green nationalism and Green politics’. In fact, from Kerrigan’s standpoint this rare ability to centrepiece environmental themes in written verse allows for some areas of comparison and contrast between Montague and Mahon, with Montague being described as someone who ‘regrets the impact of industrial culture on the countryside’, while Mahon is a ‘post-industrial poet awaiting nature’s re-emergence’.3 For the record, Mahon is a poet who has, whatever his omission from certain eco-texts in recent years, engaged in any number of eco-ventures focused on what the world so often defines, or dismisses, as subjects of lesser taxonomic importance because they are, from a homocentric or species-ist standpoint, said to be uninviting, unimportant or unpoetic. None of his ecological reference work is mere happenstance. Rather, almost all the flora and fauna he uses in his poetry tend to exhibit certain key taxonomic characteristics, the same...