Toying with Alternatives: Off-Center Resistance as Creation in the Poetry of Derek Mahon

Abstract

Since 2005, in the collections of the Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon, ex-centricity and resistance have played a central role in his depiction of contemporary world changes affecting Ireland. Dealing with globalization, the economic crisis, increased immigration and climate change, Mahon tackles the major challenges of our day while defining a framework to his own agenda as poet and inhabitant of the earth. As these concerns appear very explicitly in the poems, three main tropes shape his poetic response: resistance and flight, migration, and the constant search for alternative modes of creation and living. He achieves these through the delimitation of unmapped spaces or abandoned sites, usually on the periphery.