Journalism: Selected Prose 1970-1995 (Gallery Books) - Hardcover

Mahon, Derek

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1852351799 ISBN 13: 9781852351793

Publisher: Gallery Books, 1996

Synopsis

Book by Mahon, Derek

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Best known for his poetry, the Belfast-born Mahon here collects 57 short essays that have appeared over the past 20 years in various publications, primarily the Irish Times. Despite the format, though, he is still clearly a poet. In "A Tribute to Beckett on his Eightieth Birthday" Mahon recalls meeting the great Irish playwright and seeing his fingers, "gnarled arthritic trees." In "Joyce's Wild Goose" he repeats what the novelist's father said when hearing the name of the young woman his son had run away with: "Barnacle? She'll never leave him." He also reminisces about drinking in Dublin with the young Eavan Boland while still at Trinity; looks at Oscar Wilde's Fenianism; observes that "there are different kinds of alcoholic writer" in an essay on Malcolm Lowry; and observes that "Great stretches of [J.P.] Donleavy are thoroughly tiresome and inconsequential." His portrait of Portrush--the "Ulster Riviera" in County Antrim--is delightful in a sad way; his joyful recollection of the Trinity College Garden Party is a delight, as is his vision of Dublin in the '60s: "wonderfully seedy and raffish." Mahon, considered by many the greatest poet in Ireland after Seamus Heaney, proves himself a fine essayist who is sure to have something for everyone in this collection.

Copyright 1997 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1852351799
• ISBN 13: 9781852351793
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 241
• Editor: Brown Terence