‘Listen to the Leaves’: Derek Mahon’s Evolving Ecologies

Abstract

INew York Time, previously Hudson Letter (1996), opens in Winter, and poetic speaker is awoken amid snow and ice in York City to combined but competing strains of the first bird and first truck.1 These garbage trucks, which will later discharge their discarded cargoes onto refuse barges (NCP, 167) of fourth section, Waterfront, of sequence, are twinned with early-morning avian chorus outside beleaguered speaker's apartment window. The discordant sonority of metropolis's daybreak exposes tonal ambiguity of longer poetic sequence at same time as it addresses, in cursory fashion, dynamics of human and nonhuman ecological crisis. Derek Mahon initiates his sequence, and this day, with an incongruous but all too frequent urban duet, which aggregates natural and fabricated, and sentient and inanimate, all of which are measure of his response to crisis of industrial (or postindustrial) modernity, with useless rubbish, garbage, or waste functioning as a secular memento mori of empire of transient that is consumer culture.2 In a concise ironic gesture, Mahon disallows muse-like possibilities of unseen birdsong by using mechanical, utilitarian functions of disposal vehicle. Not only does this reference, among many others across New York Time, partake of a preoccupation with waste, but it neatly holds in one line a matter of urgency within contemporary environmentalist criticism: uneven, competing claims of environment and of global capital.New York Time, then, abounds with junked residues, neon skylines, clamorous streetscapes, and informational gluttony of postmodernity: News-time / in global village-Ethiopian drought,/ famine, whole nations, races, evicted even yet . . . / images forming which will be screened tonight / on CNN and The McNeil-Lekrer News Hour (NCP, 165). All of these are symptoms of industrialism and indiscriminate urbanization that both repel and fascinate Mahon's humanism and his aestheticism. This city is portrayed in terms of modern life as excess, as waste, as consisting of leftovers of Western humanity's appetites, yet poetic art is molded from its raw, remaindered materials. Mahon is both observer and participant in this historical pageant of consumerism but is chiefly concerned with tracking velocity of ruination and dereliction in such a cultural economy. From an ecocritical perspective, then, hubris tic modernity is worryingly devoid of a responsible historical consciousness; its forms and contents, conceived as unaging or everreplaceable monuments of triumphant capital, are exposed as transient objects on a conveyor of junked consumables.The catholicity of Mahon's cultural approach has, as we have already alluded to, always been an acknowledged facet of his work and, it seems, informs his broad ecological vision. And Hugh Haughton encapsulates chafing dynamics of locality and internationalism, with reference to Mahon's eco-conscientiousness, that condition his longer-term writing career:If he started out as a poet in resistance to his home place, he went on to become a uniquely compelling poet of other places without abandoning notion of poetry as a form of resistance.... Though in love with aesthetic, and gifted with an ear for intellectual cantabile, there is always an edge of political anger, and cultural critique in his work, born of a sense of damage that has become increasingly ecological.3Haughton is unafraid to impress political edges of Mahon's poetry, which is a step that is not always taken in critical readings of his work. Yet, ecological sensibility of his oeuvre, though expressed in different ways and with different landscapes and objects to fore at various stages, cannot be figured in any other way than in political terms. Equally, Haughton's suggestion that Mahon's poetic, and biographical, peregrinations have taken Mahon beyond bounds of Belfast and Ireland to international and cosmopolitan geographies, without blunting this political strain within his work, is crucial to appreciating gravity of his assumption of ecological advocacy in his later work. …