Ovid Among the Floating Garbage: Derek Mahon on Recycling and Exile

Abstract

Derek Mahon has continually turned to sites of ruination and environmental degradation across the vast span of his poetic corpus. His late work directly tackles the climate crisis and losses in biodiversity. Mahon is keenly aware of how the postmodern erosion of place and locality through globalization and exponential urbanization has contributed to the destruction of natural environments. Mahon’s growing environmental concerns are interwoven with a persistent interaction with the works of ancient Greek and Roman writers, perhaps most frequently Ovid. This article questions why Mahon turns time and again to Ovid when grappling with environmental destruction and when seeking to establish what role if any the poet has in cataloguing and combatting the climate crisis. It argues that the Metamorphoses provides a means of contemplating the interconnections between the human and natural world, while the Tristia and Ex Ponto offer an extensive meditation on exile and displacement. Mahon’s long lasting relationship with Ovid, however, extends beyond thematic interest. It will also be suggested that Ovid’s metapoetic and intertextual strategies provide a model for Mahon, especially when it comes to the reuse of themes and topics from his earlier work. The result is a continuous distorting of spatial boundaries and temporal progression. In the works of both Ovid and Derek Mahon, we encounter deeply entangled or rhizomatic poetry with multiple points of entry and departure. Mahon’s late work and Ovid’s exilic literature develop an aesthetic of displacement that is grounded in the recycling and reuse of their previous work. Here we might even conceive a form of poetry making that serves as a counterbalance to the waste resulting from environmental destruction and the detritus, which has come to characterize modernity.