Search results for "Derek Mahon"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
Derek Mahon's Literal Littorals
2012
International audience; A transversal reading of Derek Mahon's poems reveals his predilection for coastal landscapes: vistas of sea and seashore, harbour towns or seaside resorts. Suffused as they are with elemental symbolism (waves, wind, rain and storm, rocks, cliffs and misty piers), those liminal spaces take on a metaphysical dimension. The landscapes that the poet invests are the objective correlatives of his sense of alienation and vulnerability; they are mindscapes (paesagio mentale or reflections of the inner self) as much as territories to be paced and explored. This paper thus examines how the natural and the urban, the visual and the acoustic, the a-temporal and the modern or pos…
'[I]t wasn’t in the picture and is not': Blind Spots and Vanishing Points in Irish Poetical Self-Portraits
2016
International audience; Pictoriality and a propensity for self-examination and self-representation are characteristic of the poetry of Louis MacNeice, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. In many a poem, these four contemporary Irish poets try to capture their own portraits in words and images, through highly visual poems often inspired by paintings. This paper first examines how these poets use images and invest paintings, how verbal and iconic texts interact in their creations and to what extent self-exegesis is made possible and more successful through ekphrasis. With reference to Jacques Derrida’s essay on self-portraiture—Memoirs of the Blind: Self-Portraits and Other Ruins—thi…
‘Bring out artists ; take music, or the calm light of Dutch interior art...': Derek Mahon's Pictorial Poems
2010
International audience