• 1 Heaney (1985/2015), 3. Cited by Haughton (1992), 87.
• 2 Hugh Haughton (1992), 87.

1Derek Mahon has continually turned to sites of ruination and environmental degradation across the vast span of his poetic corpus. His late work directly tackles the climate crisis and losses in biodiversity. Mahon is keenly aware of how the postmodern erosion of place and locality through globalization and exponential urbanization has contributed to the destruction of natural environments. Rootedness with its hard-set political implications and border-building capabilities nevertheless must be guarded against and exile features heavily. As Seamus Heaney puts it, Mahon “belongs to a place that is patently riven between notions of belonging to other places”,1 yet, as Hugh Haughton observes, Mahon’s “best poems are anchored in place and placenames”.2 We see Mahon exploring entanglements between the human and natural worlds in his early work, where the experience of the homeplace as an exilic elsewhere finds expression in the trees and plants that signify contrasting landscapes. We might detect here the initial seeds of Mahon’s later and more pronounced concerns for environmental and ecological issues, which grow in urgency as the understanding of the climate crisis deepens. That said, Mahon’s poems often fold back upon each other; we encounter grafted voices and any sense of singular development or growth must be illusory. The themes of place and displacement and environmental destruction converge and diverge in different ways across his career, so that we are never on firm ground. Nevertheless when viewed over the longue durée, Mahon’s variformed poetic traversals suggest that the experience of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss can be conceived as a form of exile or displacement from the world at large. Planetary disaster hits the homeplace in changes to the immediately experienced environment.

• 3 On Ovid’s revisiting of his own work, see for example Frings 2005 and Martelli 2013.

2Mahon’s growing environmental concerns are interwoven with a persistent interaction with the works of ancient Greek and Roman writers, perhaps most frequently Ovid, and more recently, though less noted, Lucretius. Why does Mahon turn time and again to Ovid especially when grappling with environmental destruction and when seeking to establish what role if any the poet has in cataloguing and combatting the climate crisis? The Metamorphoses provides a continually transforming view of the entanglements between the human and natural world, while the Tristia and Ex Ponto offer an extensive meditation on exile and displacement. Mahon’s long lasting relationship with Ovid, however, extends beyond thematic interest. Ovid’s metapoetic and intertextual dynamism provides a model for Mahon’s grafting and regrafting of his previous poems. In particular, Ovid’s repetition of motifs and allusions across his pre- and post- exilic work serve to undercut the notion of this very binary, so that the Metamorphoses becomes reconceived from the perspective of exile, while the exilic works insert themselves into the Metamorphoses, as well as earlier work such as the Heroides and Ars Amatoria.3 The result is a continuous distorting of spatial boundaries and temporal progression. We encounter a deeply entangled or rhizomatic poetics with multiple points of entry and departure. The same can be said of Mahon’s poetry, especially his later work, which develops an aesthetic of displacement that is grounded in the recycling and reuse of his previous work. Here we might even conceive a form of poetry making that serves as a counterbalance to the waste resulting from environmental destruction and the detritus, which has come to characterize modernity.

• 4 Given the title ‘The Return’ in the original publication, after a poem by John Hewitt of the same n (...)

3Turning first to Mahon’s early work, the poem ‘Going Home’ offers us an example of how Mahon combines the Ovidian tropes of exile and entanglement with the natural world in ways that anticipate his later environmental concerns. ‘Going Home’, appears in the early collection Poems 1962-1978.4 The poem is split in two halves that map Mahon’s sense of bilocation: at the opening he is about to depart from the South Downs for Coleraine, and contemplates his connections and disconnections from these contrasting landscapes. Surrey is characterized by its forests:

• 5 The image looks forward to Mahon’s description of the pulping of Syrinx in ‘Ovid in Tomis’.
• 6 The allusion to Yeats likely indicates the personal upheaval of leaving his family in Surrey.

4Any sense of a mild English idyll quickly dissipates; the trees are dusted in vehicle emissions and the dying nymphs link environmental degradation with a sense of the gradual loss of mythic presence.5 Mahon describes himself as flicking ash into the rose bushes “as if I owned the place”. The image reworks Yeats’ ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’, who wishes for Anne to be like Daphne “to live like some green laurel / rooted in one dear perpetual place”.6 Mahon is quick to dispel Irish revivalist ideals of rootedness by splitting himself between two places and between both sides of the environmental divide – a destructive agent and a resisting though ultimately helpless observer. He is at once Apollo and Daphne. Mahon’s line “as if the trees responded / to my ignorant admiration” transforms Apollo’s (mis)interpretation of the ambiguous nod (adnuere) of Daphne after she has transformed into the laurel tree from the Metamorphoses (1.566-67). Mahon turns to Ovid to suggest a vision of non-human agency in the trees of the South Downs while equally focusing on his Apollo-like vision to indicate that this non-human agency exists only in the eyes of the human beholder.

• 7 Kerrigan (1992), 240.

5Mahon’s dedication of ‘Going Home’ to John Hewitt directs us to Hewitt’s ‘The Colony’, where, as Kerrigan states, Hewitt expresses his grief for ‘the ruin of Ireland’s ancient forests’ by turning to Ovid’s Metamorphoses:7

• 8 Kerrigan (1992), 240, describes Mahon here as ‘crossing native tree-myths with Metamorphoses’.

8Mahon draws a direct connection between the bucolic Surrey landscape and the Ovidian realm of dryads and tree transformations.8 His gaze no longer that of Apollo becomes the gaze of one of the trees; he might grow roots if he stayed there long enough. Following the allusion to Yeats’ daughter, we can similarly detect that Mahon’s desire for an impossible sense of rootedness extends to his family, which he is leaving behind. Any possibility of attunement with the natural world or belonging in Ovidian mythology is quickly dispelled by his lack of homeplace. He remains perpetually removed. He is soon to depart for Hewitt’s “crooked and malignant folk”.

• 9 McAuliffe (2015).
• 10 Heaney (1985/2015), 168.
• 11 Deane (1992) cited and discussed by Kerrigan (2004), 125.
• 12 Corcoran (1992), 8.
• 13 Kerrigan (2004), 127.
• 14 Dellner (2011), 237. Impens (2018), 127-168 also discusses Mahon and Boland’s contrasting represent (...)

13 ‘Going Home’ is an early iteration of what John McAuliffe calls Mahon’s representation of the “‘sublime disgrace’ of exile”,9 and Mahon’s attempts at making “sense of bilocation”.10 Mahon is not alone in using Ovid and the exile literature in particular to think about place and displacement on Irish coastlines. As Seamus Deane has said, Pontic fringes haunt among others Paul Muldoon, John Montague, and Brian Moore, who “keep up some of our most hallowed traditions. Exile, for instance”.11 Seamus Heaney, after relocating to Wicklow from Belfast, describes himself in ‘Exposure’ as “an inner йmigrй” “weighing and weighting / my responsible tristia”. Heaney likens himself simultaneously to Ovid and Osip Mandelstam. Morrison and Motion in the introduction to the second Field Day pamphlet see this as the origin or surfacing of an ostranenie in Heaney’s poetry,12 where allusions and places are encountered in unfamiliar terrains. Paul Muldoon in To Ireland, I, no doubt in response to Seamus Deane and Seamus Heaney, would go so far as to invert the places of exile, viewing the Irish in Ireland as the displaced. The ubiquitous presence of exile leads Kerrigan to conclude “now it is as though the erosion of the place has gone so far that exile is a hopeless conceit: if all places are interchangeable … there is no margin left to haunt”.13 But on ‘Brighton Beach’ Mahon leaves us with some wiggle room where we still might find “the spirit of a place”, even if “places as such are dead / or nearly”. Eavan Boland reads the Metamorphoses as a constant throughout her own displacements: “I can enter it anywhere. And have. / As a child in exile in / a city of fogs and strange consonants …”. Dellner states that Mahon and Boland use “Ovid to find a way, if not back from exile, then beyond it to a new sense of ‘home’, in a yearning for a poesis where the land and the apparently mute object world within it will speak for themselves”.14

• 15 Haughton (2002), 324 calls this “a secular memento mori of the empire of the transient”.
• 16 “Coca Cola” was formerly “hair conditioner” in the edition published in the Poetry Ireland Review. (...)
• 17 Haughton (2010), 170.

14The “last stubborn” growth on the bleak Northern Irish coastline in ‘Going Home’ is described as “rooted in stony ground”. The image owes much to T. S. Eliot’s “what are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / out of this stony rubbish” from ‘The Burial of the Dead’ in The Wasteland. For Mahon the coastal margin becomes increasingly characterized by rubbish—the washed-up plastic pollution strewn across our shorelines—the exile co-habiting with the cast-offs of consumer culture.15 In the 1980s and early 90s, Mahon’s interest in the interconnection between environmental concerns and our sense of place, become less focused on the displacement of the individual; he turns instead to the places and objects that have been left behind. The themes of ruin and abandonment eloquently explored in ‘A Garage in Co. Cork’ and ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’, poems rife with Ovidian allusions, gain further social and cultural resonances in the detritus and disjecta carried over from the far shore. In ‘Ovid in Tomis’, from Hunt by Night (1982), Mahon further explores the interconnections between detritus and displacement in his vision of exiled objects. Mahon’s Ovid like the garbage surrounding him is washed-up on the Pontic coast, a formerly “living-legend” in line with Ovid’s self-mythologizing in the Tristia. The poem begins with Mahon in the guise of Ovid asking “what coarse god / was the gearbox in the rain? … What nereid the unsinkable / Coca-Cola?”16 The Coca-Cola can or bottle bobbing along knocks against the aptly exaggerated “icy rocks”, consumed and discarded like Ovid on a distant land and “set down / on an alien shore”. Alongside the rusting gearbox it signals a cultural and environmental crisis brought about by “the unwitting permanence of modern technological detritus”;17 pollution has led the ghost to leave the machine.

• 18 Lysaght (2021), 84. This urbanity has often been seen as a characteristic of especially the early M (...)
• 19 See Harrison (2020), 198-211, for a recent discussion of the attribution of the Halieutica to Ovid.

15Mahon’s Ovid spends his days birdwatching (a potential reference to the Ibis) and writing the Halieutica, a manual on sea-fishing, which gives him “a sense / of purpose, however factitious” and “desultory”; he has transformed into a “naturalist” cataloguing the loss of biodiversity. There is a reference here to Seamus Heaney’s ‘Death of a Naturalist’, as Mahon’s “coarse god” in the opening stanza alludes to Heaney’s “I ducked through hedges / to a coarse croaking that I had not heard / before”. Mahon’s reference to the Halieutica ahead of any other work from the exilic corpus refocuses Ovid’s perspective on his immediate habitat; the banishment and lamentations of the individual are exchanged for the degradation of the coastal environment that he occupies: as Seán Lysaght states “for all his urbanity … Mahon’s Ovid is grounded in the weather and wildlife of the Danube delta”.18 The uncertainty and transience of this landscape is matched by the textual artefact. The Halieutica is a fragmentary text and its attribution to Ovid remains disputed;19 this allows Mahon to map this fractured environment in the intertextually piecemeal nature of his work.

• 20 Porter, J. (2019) provides a good discussion of Object-Oriented Ontologies in Classics.
• 21 cf. Seamus Heaney’s ‘Underground’ where Heaney sees himself as Pan chasing Syrinx: “And me, me then (...)

16Mahon in the guise of Ovid takes object-oriented ontology to absurdist extremes with subversive irony: while skimming stones he ‘winces’ ‘with vicarious pain / as a slim quoit goes in’.20 The tone, however, quickly shifts from the sardonic to the horrific as his attention moves to the reeds of the delta sighing in the wind. Despite Pan being dead, Syrinx still keens “her naked terror” and for “the certain future”, which extends to the inevitability of ecological collapse. She is “bulk-destined / for pulping machines / and the cording / of motor-car tyres”.21 Mahon extends Syrinx’s transformation from human to reed to paper pulp to automobile part; she is unwillingly co-opted into consumer culture becoming sequentially the blank page and a component of the most polluting machine. Once worn down she will be added to the scrapheap of “our wrecked technologies”; the car tyre takes us back to the opening image of the “gearbox in the rain” abandoned “beside the road”, where we are left only to guess “what coarse god” it was previously. Through Syrinx’s series of metamorphoses even myth is monetarized, leading to a world where there are no gods left “out there / to hear our choral odes”. The tone is markedly Lucretian, where the gods if they still exist at all have little interest in human affairs: “are we truly alone / with our physics and myths, / the stars no more /than glittering dust”. The images connect to a standard set of Lucretian tropes, where myth can be rationalized away through science. Ovid and Lucretius are combined as we are called upon to concentrate “on the infinity / under our very noses”, (even jokes on Naso’s nose are worn-out) where we might expect to gaze upon “the gaiety of atoms”.

• 22 Haughton (2010), 170.
• 23 Kerrigan (1992), 261.
• 24 This line is adapted from the Salve Regina and its reuse by Peter Quinn for the title of his novel, (...)

17In the last line of ‘Ovid in Tomis’ Mahon has Ovid “weep for our exile”. As Haughton puts it, Mahon in the guise of Ovid is an “intellectual coming to terms with the exilic nature of modernity”.22 John Kerrigan notes that for Mahon “shorefronts have represented that despairing frontier of mind from which exile poetry speaks”.23 These frontiers, however, are polluted shorelines; we find Ovid at the “litter-strewn littoral”. Mahon turns to myths such as that of Syrinx to contemplate the ways in which environmental degradation goes hand in hand with the erosion of humanity and human values; the trash encountered on the shoreline is also the socially discarded. Or as Mahon himself says in his vision of the homeless in New York in ‘XII Alien Nation’ from the Hudson Letter, we are the “poor banished children of Eve … with nowhere left to call home”.24

• 25 Kerrigan (1992).
• 26 Kerrigan (1992), 257.
• 27 Haughton (2002), 325.

18Mahon figures the poet as a form of rubbish-picker, clutching for bits and pieces of meaning in detritus and dereliction and among this litter we find the literary. We encounter displaced myths from the shores of far-flung cultures as “bright garbage on the incoming wave” (‘Roman Script’). As Kerrigan says, “trash in Mahon is stuff en route to new meanings, in metamorphosis”.25 In ‘Going Home’ and ‘Ovid and Tomis’ we see how Mahon uses the allusive structure of his poems to display displacement alongside environmental and social degradation. Kerrigan compares his poetry to found or junk art, bric-a-brac assemblages, like Picasso’s work in the early ’50s.26 Mahon, however, rejects such comparisons; on the evidence of The Yellow Book, as Haughton notes, Mahon “has little time for the likes of Damien Hirst” and in ‘At the Chelsea Arts Club’ “he recoils violently from the modish sensationalism of the new Britart”, with its “trash aesthetics”:27

• 28 There are numerous Ovidian features in the Hudson Letter from ‘VIII Ovid on West 4^th’ with its adap (...)

20Take for instance ‘XVI Key West’ from the Hudson Letter, (1995)28 where Mahon begins by evoking the minor storm Angie from the previous year. This in turn leads him to recall the destruction brought about by the Labor Day storm of 1935 and the misremembering of the 1935 storm in John Huston’s 1948 film Key Largo. The proliferation of storms continues; as an apparently actual storm blows, Mahon cites and translates the opening lines of book 2 of Lucretius’ de Rerum Natura (1-2):

• 30 This is later changed to “strewn with wrack” in New York Time.

21The language, “it’s cool”, and the vision from the shore recasts Lucretius in the light of Huston’s film and the tribulations of the gangster Johnny Rocco (exiled to Cuba some years before) at the onset of the Labor Day storm. Mahon’s attention then turns to the storm’s aftermath and the rubbish washed in on the morning tide: “It was one of those far-out, raw mornings, the beaches / littered with dreck”.30 Mahon’s allusion might equally be seen as literary debris scattered across Key West: “and I saw why once to these shores came other cold / solitaries down from the north in search of love and poetry”. The other “solitaries” might initially be taken as further storms, before we recognize that Mahon sees himself as following the path of Elizabeth Bishop. The aftermath of the minor storm allows Mahon to consider the effacement of place that results from cyclones and tornados and large-scale environmental catastrophes: “towns and cities everywhere / vulnerable to a trickle of sand, to a breath of fresh air”. Rubbish now signifies the vulnerability of costal communities to the rising tides and growing meteorological instability, and for the susceptibility of place to transform into detritus.

• 31 Haughton (1992), 94, shows how ‘Rage for Order’ presents a “political landscape that compounds the (...)

22Further references abound in Mahon’s dense sea forest of allusion: “triste tropique” recalls Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, titled A World on the Wane in its English translation by John Russel; Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ is also in the background. “Gin in paw”, Auden is the subject of ‘X St Mark’s Place’ from earlier in the Hudson Letter. In ‘Key West’, Mahon suggestively alludes to the blind eye cast on the fall of Icarus: “how everything turns away / quite leisurely from the disaster”. This becomes synonymous with a disregard for the climate crisis. In the Hudson Letter Mahon also enacts a literary return to Key West. His early poem ‘Rage for Order’, originally in Lives (1972) is a response to Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’: in this “eddy of semantic scruples” Mahon, searching for meaning “in an unstructurable sea”, reuses the poetry of others as well as his own to map the planet’s expanding gyre of rubbish.31

• 32 Flannery (2016), 22.
• 33 Flannery (2016), 27: “The earlier work seems to chart and to narrate, in ambiguous tones, the ravag (...)

23Mahon in the 90s is “chiefly concerned with tracking the velocity of ruination and dereliction” brought about by Western consumerism,32 while in the 2000s he writes openly on the climate crisis, perhaps most transparently in Life on Earth (2008) with its centerpiece ‘Homage to Gaia’.33 At the same time Mahon more frequently turns to his earlier work as hunting grounds for raw material; self-appropriation becomes for Mahon a means of displaying how poetry might counteract the waste of consumer culture. Pondering the nature of human selfhood and the socio-political role of poetry is never, however, far away from Mahon’s concerns, as he explores old and new ways of challenging and reimagining the nature/culture divide. This involves linking recycling with a vision of reincarnation that draws upon the speech of Pythagoras from book 15 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in conjunction with Hindu and Buddhist beliefs of Saṃsāra. Mahon attempts to encounter his previous lives and seeks in the Classical past and the religions of the Indian subcontinent a potential solution for a Western-induced environmental collapse.

• 34 Lovelock (1972), 579-580.
• 35 Flannery (2016), 383.

24In the nine-poem sequence ‘Homage to Gaia’, Mahon turns to James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which presents a model for a planetary ecosystem where “life at an early stage of its evolution acquired the capacity to control the global environment to suit its needs”.34 In such a system humans are part of a fully interconnected biosphere, which would appear to facilitate the desire Mahon expressed in his early work to be recognized among the trees (‘Going Home’). Lovelock’s theory also provides Mahon with a model for looking to the classical past for a solution to the present crisis. In Lovelock’s vision, however, place appears to lose all meaning as life and the earth are conceived as one and the same. Instead displacement and exile reemerge as ways of conceiving trans-migration. As Flannery notes, Lovelock’s letter captures many of the driving forces of Mahon’s later works: “mutability; interconnectedness; and the damaging irresponsibility that characterizes humanity’s short period of participation in the Gaian life-cycle on Earth”.35 Phrased in such a manner, it is easy to see how Mahon draws a straight line from Lovelock to Ovid.

• 36 McAuliffe (2015).

28Ariadne is fixed at a moment of transition, “there my heart froze”, abandoned by Theseus and unable to return to her homeland. Displaced and discarded Ariadne grieves “above the cold beach and the pounding waves”. We are on familiar “barren” ground. John McAuliffe sees Mahon as “sympathetic to Ariadne’s isolated exile, stuck between her fatherland and her lover, a sort of anti-Odysseus who can never go home, who lives seemingly without alternative in the aftermath of great events”.36 In other words Mahon uses the well-rehearsed position of displacement to equate exile and the contemporary experience of eco-anxiety. Mahon turns to Ariadne to display a collective sense of powerlessness when faced with a global catastrophe. There is no help coming from elsewhere and as Ariadne states “I’ve no faith left in people I don’t know”. Mahon returns to Ovid and the position of abandonment at a distant shoreline and places this at the forefront of his most direct engagement with the climate crisis.

• 37 In Mahon’s author’s note to the collection he states the Appendix: Raw Material from the Hindi of G (...)

31The 2011 collection Raw Material is Mahon’s most fully fledged attempt to combine his vision of the transmigration of souls with the recycling and displacement of texts; ‘raw material’ refers at least in part to the ‘originals’ which form the basis of the collection’s series of adaptive translations. As Aingeal Clare remarks in her Guardian review: “fittingly for a book of ‘unhoused’ poems, otherwise translations, the theme of displacement runs forcefully through this collection”, which includes Propertius’s Cynthia removed to the Irish countryside “hitching up [her] skirt for a good céilí” and the forced exile of transported slaves to West Virginia in ‘Loango Strand’. The title poem, which appears in ‘Appendix: Raw Material from the Hindi of Gopal Singh (‘born 1959’)’ is, however, a ‘translation’ of a non-existent ‘original’ of Mahon’s own invention.37 In the author’s note to the collection he expresses his desire to “recreate the spirit” of the “original”. In the case of ‘Raw Material’ he is seeking to recreate the spirit of some fictional former self. The poem compares translation—the use of raw material—with the recycling of old shoes:

• 38 Bair (1990), 71.

32Mahon plays upon the echoing of the sole of a shoe and the soul of the self to reflect on reincarnation, recycling and the role of artwork in bringing such connections to light. The old shoes containing former soles are the raw materials for Mahon’s translation. Mahon appears to hint at the anecdote that Samuel Beckett even wore pointed-toe patent leather pumps that were too small “because he wanted to [have] the same shoe in the same size as Joyce, who was very proud of his small, neatly shod feet”.38 In this case, however, the well-worn shoes are Mahon’s own. When recycled they also become part of the earth’s raw material, while the soul or spirit of the wearer, discarding his body but not his soul might transmigrate into a mosquito. There is significant ambiguity at the heart of Mahon’s transmigratory vision. His reference to Avatar signals at once a character in a videogame, James Cameron’s film released two years prior, and the released soul taking bodily form on earth, the manifestation of divinity in Hinduism.

• 39 The seminal work remains Hardie (1995).
• 40 In ‘Heraclitus on Rivers’, from Poems 1962-78, there is an indication of Mahon’s early interest in (...)

33Such ideology and wry wordplay is hard to take entirely seriously. Mahon is once again close to Ovid. We are reminded of the ongoing debate of how sincerely to take Pythagoras’ speech in book 15 of the Metamorphoses. Mahon’s phrasing “I who was once a virus, / once a mosquito” echoes that of Empedocles: “For as for me, once I was already both a youth and a girl / a bush and a bird, and a sea-leaping, voyaging fish” (DK 117). The centrality of Empedocles in Ovid’s Speech of Pythagoras has long been demonstrated.39 For Empedocles transmigration is also a form of exile: πλάζεται ἄνδιχ' ἕκαστα περὶρρηγμῖνι βίοιο. “they wander, all of them separately, about the breakers of life” (DK 20). For Empedocles, Ovid, and Mahon the far-flung shore “at the edge of everything” now metaphorically stands for the distanced daimon caught in a state of perpetually exchanging body and place. Some respite might be found with the aviator who casts up back to Yeats’ Irish airman foreseeing his death: “a waste of breath the years behind / in balance with this life, this death”. For Mahon, Saṃsāra and Pythagorean metempsychosis might still provide a greater balance with nature and an alternative to the wastes of modernity.40

• 41 Haughton (2010), 326.
• 42 Haughton (2002), 326.
• 43 From Joshua Reno’s foreword from the 2017 revised edition of Thompson’s book: “As such, it is only (...)

36Mahon’s ‘Rubbish Theory’ is titled after the theory developed by Michael Thompson. Mahon’s interest in Thompson’ Rubbish Theory goes at least as far back as the Hudson Letter: ‘homeless/rubbish theory’ is written in the margins of early drafts of ‘Out There’.41 As Hugh Haughton argues Mahon is drawn to Thompson’s theory because of his interest in the primary relation between rubbish and cultural value, and in particular “the process whereby things move from one category to another”.42 Mahon in ‘Rubbish Theory’, however has become at least partially critical of Thompson and perhaps the notion of theory at large with its similarly short lifespan43:

• 44 McAuliffe (2015).

39Mahon “resurrects the waste of his earlier work” but wants it now to function as more than “ominous relics of ruination”. He also inverts the temporal sequence of artistic creation and critical response. What concerns him here is the “unsalvageable junk, the forlorn things with no hope of ever being antiques or even relics of contemporary material culture”. It is not enough for rubbish to signify the dereliction resulting from the age of consumerism; instead he seeks a way forward. As John McAuliffe sees it, where once Mahon “thrived on descriptions of a posthumous, post-human plane”’, his “new ecology celebrates … the coming post-petroleum age, writing perhaps the first hymns to alternative energy supplies”.44 Ovid remains close to Mahon’s new ecologies: