Scale, Deep Time, and the Politics of Representation in Derek Mahon's Life on Earth

Abstract

This essay reads Derek Mahon's 2008 collection, Life on Earth, in broadly ecocritical terms, arguing that the ecological concentrations of Mahon's recent work centre on the representational relationships between human and non-human ecologies; on matters of ecological belonging and placelessness, in local and international contexts; as well as probing the ethics of anthropocentric historical narration in terms of geological time and the ‘deep’ past. Furthermore, the argument focuses on the poet's attention to scalar relations in time and space and how they relate to anthropogenic climate change. It also highlights Mahon's recourse to ekphrasis in his meditation upon the politics and ethics of aesthetic representation in the context of global environmental destruction.