Derek Mahon, who has died aged 78, was one of the great poets of his native Ireland and of the English-speaking world. He was routinely discussed alongside his contemporaries Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, although his work was utterly different from that of either.
To poets growing up from the 1960s onwards, Mahon’s early books, such as The Snow Party (1975) and The Hunt by Night (1982), were an inspiration and a challenge. His poems were lyrical, witty, ironic, succinct, cosmopolitan, rich in phrase and image. Their formal splendour could be breathtaking. Mahon was capable of both grandeur and the demotic, wide-ranging in history and literature, environmentally and socially engaged but no one’s spokesman. His work combined an apocalyptic vision with a utopian sense of survival and renewal.
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