Subject Area: Irish & Ireland: All Subjects
Mc Elroy, James2019 1-4955-0768-8 556 pages
This book provides a comprehensive and critical review of Derek Mahon's poetry and criticism from the 1960s to the present day (2019). As well as providing one of the very few detailed studies of Mahon's work in English, French, and more, it provides an entirely new approach to reading, more properly re-reading, his various publications in accordance with the belief that a specifically symptomic reading - lecture symptomale - might help us to better elicit, and identify, those gaps, lapses, and silences, that give Mahon's writing its unique characteristics as part of a literature that has been, and is, largely determined by the unusual circumstances and colonial realities that continue to prevail in Northern Ireland.