• 1 James Lovelock, “What is Gaia?”, in Earth Shattering: Ecopoems, Neil Astley (ed.), Tarset, Bloodaxe (...)

Most of us sense that the Earth is more than a sphere of rock with a thin layer of air, ocean and life covering the surface. We feel that we belong here as if this planet were indeed our home. Long ago the Greeks, thinking this way, gave to the Earth the name Gaia or, for short, Ge. In those days, science and theology were one and science, although less precise, had soul.
James Lovelock, “What is Gaia?”1

• 2 Derek Mahon, “Thammuz”, Lines Review, no. 52/53, 1975, reprinted in The Snow Party, London – New Yo (...)
• 3 Derek Mahon’s latest collection, Against the Clock, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, came out in Septe (...)
• 4 We borrow the expression from Marie Mianowski: “Writing the Stories of the Celtic Tiger: An Intervi (...)

1Prior to the rapid changes of the Celtic Tiger years, Derek Mahon’s poetry was haunted both by dereliction and renewal as described in poems like “Thammuz” (first published in 1975) or, in an altogether different register, “A Garage in Co. Cork” (first published in 1982)2. Those were the years when environmental issues started to come to the fore in Ireland. However, it took some time before the poet developed what may be called an ecopoetic or geopoetic sensitivity which gradually became more prominent in the works he published from the mid-2000s, from Harbour Lights (2005) to Rising Late (2017)3. That this awareness of ecological issues in Mahon’s poetical works may be indebted to the fin-de-siècle and early 21^st-century Zeitgeist or, presumably, to the poet’s deeper personal preoccupation with the future of the planet only reveals the poet’s acute sense of the power of artistic imagination and production in highlighting the scope of the changes and “cycles of doom and gloom”4 that affect the life of our planet.

• 5 Achill Island, Co. Mayo, is situated off the west coast of Ireland and, indeed, in March 2017, the (...)

2Moreover, and interestingly enough, his attention has always been turned to the sea so that when it comes to ecology Mahon does not seem to be especially preoccupied with the issue of the land, or of the soil, and especially of the Irish soil. His ecological preoccupations lie rather with the earth, or Earth (as Ge or Gaia, as a global force capable of renewing itself by itself), and in particular with the beach, which is a go-between, between land and sea, a no-one’s land, so to speak, that does not belong to anyone since it is continually covered and recovered by the sea. The beach belongs to the sea and the sea decides whether to engulf it, or, more rarely, to abandon it and let the land reclaim it, as has recently been the case on Achill Island where two beaches have miraculously reappeared5.

• 6 This quote is recycled from Aidan Higgins’ novel Balcony of Europe, Neil Murphy (ed.), Champaign, D (...)
• 7 Derek Mahon, “A Country Road”, in New Collected Poems, p. 309. Most of the excerpts quoted are from (...)

• 8 Derek Mahon, “A Lighthouse in Maine”, in NCP, p. 299.
• 9 Notions are “complex systems of physico-cultural properties”; “In the lexical domain: one must thin (...)

5“It might be anywhere”8, and it might “synthesize” several locations all at once. This extract is fairly representative of the poet’s vision of an involvement in his surroundings and shows that the poet does not focus on ø land or a land or the land as denoting a specific country, or on ø soil as referring to the ground one treads or cultivates. He does not focus either on ø territory as a bordered identified area. Instead the poem describes a live landscape of hedgerow, ditch, field, hawthorn and lilacs, birds, rook, rabbit and rat at springtime. In these lines, the notions9 of /land/, /soil/ and /territory/ are indirectly evoked through the components of a country road landscape including cultivated land, wild hedgerows, clouds and wind, fauna and flora. Besides, the country road described is not far from the sea whose distinct smell fills the air: “sea stench / of kelp and trench”.

• 10 The numbers of occurrences are not absolutely accurate, resulting from a manual count after reading (...)
• 11 Derek Mahon, “The Woods”, in NCP, p. 124.

6As if to confirm this indirectness, the number of occurrences of the words land and soil in the whole of New Collected Poems (2011) is surprisingly low: there are about ten to fifteen occurrences of land including compounds, only two or three occurrences of soil. In contrast, the words earth (thirty to forty occurrences) and, in particular, sea, are conspicuous in the whole of the poetry: nearly half of the 212 poems collected in NCP contain one or several occurrences of the word sea either as a single lexical item and/or a sea-compound10. The poems describe a seascape, have the sea as a background setting, or reflect on the relation between man and his familiar environment through the perception of an enunciator-poet who once wrote “But how could we / survive indefinitely / so far from the city and the sea?”11. The linguistic context of these occurrences shows that the notions themselves do not make sense as individual concepts but in relation to one another, as can be observed in the extracts below:

• 12 Derek Mahon, “The Banished Gods”, in NCP, p. 77.

• 13 Derek Mahon, “Homage to Gaia”, in NCP, p. 322.

• 14 Derek Mahon, “After the Storm”, in NCP, p. 344.

• 15 See footnote 9.

7In these three extracts, the absence of determiner can be analyzed as the trace of an operation constructing a reference to the notional domain of /land/ as “a complex system of physico-cultural properties”15, in contrast with another one, which it is not: land is not sea (and vice versa); land is not “the great waste beyond” either, and even when the material difference or limit between them has been effaced by some exceptional meteorological event as described in (4), the language still makes the difference: “Not much distinction now between sea and land” (our emphasis). Imagination mixes the two in an unnamed “scape”, neither landscape nor seascape, but flooded ground (water and earth mingling together). Moreover, the very discontinuities of the landscape – “the trade routes”, “the seas” (2), “hinterland” (5), an “island” (6) and (8), “the sandy soil” and “the ocean rim” (7), “meadows” and “strand” (8) – define a territory which is, most of the time, viewed from the sea:

• 16 Derek Mahon, “A Garage in Co. Cork”, in NCP, p. 122.

• 17 Derek Mahon, “Rathlin”, in NCP, p. 98.

• 18 Derek Mahon, “Homage to Gaia”, in NCP, p. 325.

• 19 Derek Mahon, “Ithaca”, in NCP, p. 329.

• 20 Ibid.
• 21 The notional domain of /earth/ is “summarized” by the recurrent word earth and its compounds (appro (...)

8The two occurrences of soil in (7) and (8) are both qualified. In (7), besides the need for a rhyme (soil / oil), the qualification sandy draws the reader’s attention to the processes of erosion that transform some substance into another one, itself the repository for a biological process of transmutation of a plant into combustible matter, coal or oil, through “geological time”. Thus every substance is connected through metamorphosis (sand and soil, coal and oil). The second occurrence in (8) is located in relation to him [Ulysses] via the determiner his, thus marking a close relationship between locator and located element. Two lines of verse later, “his own soil” becomes “his native earth”, then “another island” before he “knows” his own island. The island as a finite territory is emblematic of the whole earth itself, mother of all living things and humans, encompassing land and sea: “It boasts fine pasture for cows and goats, / oak, pine and boatyards. It’s not vast, as you will see, but rich in crops and wine / and generously fed with dew and rain”20. In this respect the notion /earth/21 is most significant since it conveys the idea of a “reality” which is spiritual and material all at once, spectacle and interplay between order and chaos. A network of semantic threads are interlaced to form not just a pattern but a fabric subsumed under the notion /earth/ with land and sea both juxtaposed and joined by a liminal strand, with soil, sand, and rock(s) as testimony to a perennial process of disintegration, oblivion, and regeneration through transformation.

• 22 Derek Mahon, “Sand Studies”, in NCP, p. 270.

9However, of land and sea – hence earth and water – the latter notion has come to predominate over the first one: “Driftwood and cloud castle, / expiring lines of froth, / absorbing sand where every / worm-hole is a discovery: / two worlds, earth and air; water, the best of both”22, and this feature opens new reading perspectives of the poet’s work.

• 24 Rachel Carson is the author of Under the Sea-Wind [1941], which celebrates the open sea (London, Pe (...)
• 25 Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value [1979], London, Pluto Press (...)
• 26 Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit, t. I, L’intrigue et le récit historique, Paris, Seuil (Points Essais), (...)

Influenced by the poetic approach to the earth as an endangered planet developed by scientist Rachel Carson24 and, more recently, by his reading of Michael Thompson’s 1979 ground-breaking study, Rubbish Theory, and of British scientist James Lovelock’s autobiography, Homage to Gaia25, Mahon may be labelled as a “green poet”. However, it can be argued that this is somehow reductive. Mahon is no activist but rather a recorder of “life on earth”, a poet-artist who draws the line between politics and aesthetics, a poet-philosopher acutely aware of time, geological time, history time and life time (in other words, cosmological, chronological, and psychological time), with past and future indefinitely fused as in a Moebius strip. Most of his poetry, in many ways, is a kind of “rumination inconclusive”26:

• 30 Let us only mention here Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817, 1847 for a second edition).

As has been mentioned, the poet’s poetical exploration of the earth and its landscapes is indebted to scientific accounts of biodiversity (Carson and Lovelock) and to social studies (Thompson) but also to other literary works30. It has gradually, poem after poem, come to focus on water, on the sea and its fringes, and outermost bounds where water and earth meet:

• 32 Agnès Derail-Imbert, “La philosophie à la plage”, Études anglaises, vol. 59, no. 3, 2006, p. 305. M (...)

13In Mahon’s poetry, Nature cannot be approached otherwise than through strolling, wandering, walking, but most crucially through human experiences; and in this respect, the shore and beaches of Kinsale provide him with a new perspective, as Agnès Derail-Imbert notes: “une autre manière d’enquêter sur la ‘culture humaine’”32.

• 33 Derek Mahon interview in Writing Irish: Selected Interviews with Irish Writers from the Irish Liter (...)
• 34 Derek Mahon, “My Wicked Uncle”, in Night-Crossing, London – New York – Toronto, Oxford University P (...)

14Still, we may wonder why Mahon has chosen to focus his poetic attention on the beach (and inevitably on the sea) in particular, and especially from an ecological perspective. He has always been strongly attracted to the sea, which runs in the family, as his male relatives all worked in the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast or in the merchant navy. He called one of his uncles, a sailor, “extraordinarily romantic because he had left Belfast”33 and the appeal of his uncle’s seafaring life is evoked in an early poem, “My Wicked Uncle”34. Mahon himself wanted to be a sailor, as he recalls in an interview in 1999:

• 36 Derek Mahon, “A Curious Ghost”, in CP, p. 62.
• 37 Ibid.
• 38 Ibid.

15This episode crops up again in a poem entitled “A Curious Ghost”, in which he says “I failed the eyesight test / When I tried for the Merchant Navy / And lapsed into this lyric lunacy”36, and evokes the ghost of his father-in-law, “a sea captain who died at sea, almost”37. When his father-in-law died, “They found unfinished poems in your sea-chest [his uncle’s]”38: to Mahon, the sea is an “invitation au voyage”, to use Baudelaire’s words, but also an invitation to poetry, to this “lyric lunacy” he has lapsed into.

• 41 Derek Mahon, “Entropy”, in Poems 1962-1978, p. 49.
• 42 Derek Mahon, “What Will Remain”, in Lives, London, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 26.
• 43 Derek Mahon, “An Image from Beckett”, in CP, p. 40.
• 44 Derek Mahon, “A Stone Age Figure Far Below”, in CP, p. 42.
• 45 Hugh Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon, p. 93.

18In both poems we may notice the use of the same adjective terminal: “the terminal light of beaches” and “the terminal democracy of hatbox and crab” (our emphasis). In both cases, “terminal” refers to the fact that this disposal of daily consumer objects is final, irretrievable. “Terminal” also suggests the notion of ending, like the full stop of a sentence, as if the society of men had to end there, on a beach, the only survivors being tins, shoelaces, white wood, wine bottles and glass cleaning products such as Windolene, almost all of these objects being non-recyclable. This final or “terminal” stage of a society where only waste remains is a leitmotiv in Mahon’s poems, and this even in his early poems, where his discourse is mainly eschatological, with poems such as “Entropy”41, “What Will Remain”42, “An Image from Beckett”43 or also “A Stone Age Figure Far Below”44. Thus Mahon’s poems from the end of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s are impregnated with the fear of catastrophe or even apocalypse, whether ecological or historical, as reflected by the publication of two major works at the time, echoing the fears of the Zeitgeist, such as Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962), and The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode (1968) which retraces the eschatological paradigm in literature. As Haughton remarks, Mahon’s poetry echoes the concerns of Carson and Kermode, but also those due to the historical events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as the Cuba crisis, the Vietnam War, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the awareness of the Holocaust, the “increasingly vocal ecological debate about the effect of industrialization and the survival of the planet”45, as well as the crisis in Northern Ireland.

• 47 Derek Mahon, “The Great Wave”, in An Autumn Wind, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 2010, p. 77.

21This scenario, where the storm wrecks human artefacts and leaves them abandoned on the beach or on another tabula rasa, is recurrent throughout Mahon’s œuvre, and may be found again in poems such as “The Great Wave” or “After the Storm”. “The Great Wave”, published in 2010 in An Autumn Wind, refers to the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, and depicts how “the swirling mud receded leaving a waste / of bodies, furniture, palm trunks, dereliction / and in the streets the contents of an ocean”47. The description by the poet of this “waste” left by the ocean corresponds to what Lena M. Lencek, in her essay entitled “The Beach as Ruin”, calls “the chronic deposits of catastrophe”:

• 50 Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, p. 92.
• 51 Derek Mahon, “Rubbish Theory”, p. 22.

23The storm displaces what belonged inside the home (“carpet and car, / computers and a wide range of expensive / gadgetry”, but also “furniture and linen, crockery, shoes / and clothes”), transforming personal appliances and belongings into waste, thus exposing them as unwanted rubbish. This exposure of rubbish is precisely what may disturb the eye of the flâneur, when taking a stroll near the River Lee for instance, or on the beach, as Thompson in his previously mentioned essay, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, emphasizes: “Something which has been discarded, but never threatens to intrude, does not worry us at all. But rubbish in the wrong place is emphatically visible and extremely embarrassing”50. There is anger in Mahon’s ecopoetic poems, which may also be felt in his own recent essay entitled “Rubbish Theory”, after Thompson’s Rubbish Theory. In this essay, Mahon reminds the reader in an outraged tone of the existence of “a sea of rubbish, hundreds of miles wide, in the Pacific”51, and expresses his concern about “unsalvageable junk”:

• 53 A prefatory note says: “The Dry Salvages – presumably les trois sauvages – is a small group of rock (...)

24The term unsalvageable is quite meaningful in this context, as it may help us define Mahon’s poetic and metaphysical quest, that is to say how to select, “salvage” and recycle what may be “salvaged” in terms of poetic interest, which very often goes against the economic and commercial values of consumer society. Hence the fundamental role of the sea as the eternal provider of objects / subjects of poetical value for the poet, as T. S. Eliot in the section entitled “The Dry Salvages”53 of the Four Quartets reasserts:

• 55 A fishing net that hangs vertically in the water, having floats at the upper edge and sinkers at th (...)

25In Eliot’s poem, the sea ceaselessly brings to the poet natural and artificial elements worthy of being “salvaged” (the first meaning of “salvage” refers to the fact of saving a ship or its cargo from perils of the sea), which are “hints of earlier and other creation”, whether natural such as “the starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone” or man-made, such as “the torn seine55, / The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar / And the gear of foreign dead men”. Contrary to natural objects, man-made artefacts arrive on the beach “torn”, “shattered” or “broken”, as they have been unable to resist the destructive power of the sea.

• 59 Henry David Thoreau, “The Beach Again”, in Cape Cod, p. 929.

28In a way the poet or the intellectual is both wrecker and writer, as he recovers salvage from the wrecked vessels and collects them in his narrative or in his poem, in order to make a work of art out of this ruin. In Cape Cod, Thoreau describes the beach as the place where “the waste and wrecks of human art”59 are exhibited, as if in an art gallery where the exhibition is always temporary and renewed everyday, according to the will of the curator, that is to say the sea.

• 60 Henry David Thoreau, “The Highland Light”, ibid., p. 979 (our emphasis).
• 61 Derek Mahon, “Rage for Order”, in CP, p. 47.

29At the same time, the advantage of the beach, both for Thoreau and Mahon, lies in its impartiality: “The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world”60, to use Thoreau’s words. Mahon, for instance, has always refused to take sides, so to speak, especially during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and right from the beginning preferred to evoke the conflict indirectly, through the carcasses of the “burnt-out / buses”61 lying on the streets. Therefore it is not surprising that the very neutrality of the beach particularly appealed to him, as a vantage point to contemplate the world without having to take sides, as the objects or rejectamenta are naturally rejected on the sand by the tide, reclaimed by no one except by the poet. The beach constitutes the ideal playground for the poet, as he is able to collect and assemble the toys that interest him the most on the beach: tins, hatboxes, crockery… He even instrumentalizes the ecological perspective on rubbish and waste, as it allows him both to express his concern for Gaia, and also to poetically reclaim the discarded debris lying on the beach. The beach is also the place where renewal is made possible, as Lencek suggests in “The Beach as Ruin”:

• 63 The expression is borrowed from Derek Mahon’s poem, “A Building Site”, in An Autumn Wind, p. 37.
• 64 Derek Mahon, “Rubbish Theory”, p. 25 (our emphasis).
• 65 See Andy Hughes’ beautiful photographs of disjecta on the beaches in Dominant Wave Theory.
• 66 Derek Mahon, “The Apotheosis of Tins”, p. 69.
• 67 Baptiste Monsaingeon, Homo detritus: critique de la société du déchet, Paris, Seuil, 2017.
• 68 Derek Mahon, “Rising Late”, in Rising Late.

30To Mahon the beach is a perpetual “building site”63, where everything may always be transformed at any moment: “The discarded stuff lives on though; there is a dark energy there in the dustbins of history, of potential use in some future ecological dispensation”64. As in Andy Hughes’ photographs of rubbish on the Cornwall beaches65, there is unexpected beauty to be found in the rubbish lying on the beach, and resistance to the erosion of time, as in “The Apotheosis of Tins”: “We shall be with you while there are beaches”66. The beach, supplied by the creative power of the sea, offers to what Baptiste Monsaingeon names the “Homo detritus”67 (poets included), a whole range of possibilities, as Mahon reminds us of in one of his latest poems, “Rising Late”: “The vast sea-breath reminds us, even these days / as even more oil and junk slosh in the waves, / the future remains open to alternatives”68.

• 69 Ibid.
• 70 The New Oxford Dictionary of English, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 727.

31Any reader of Mahon’s poems cannot but be struck by the omnipresence of the sea throughout the poetry. Over the years, the poet’s attitude has evolved from a youthful romantic outlook on nature, land, and water to a more sophisticated understanding of the imprint of time and civilization on the landscapes, at home and abroad. His awareness of ecological stakes goes beyond a superficial concern for our environment and the sea enables him to look out, to embrace distant horizons, and to consider life in the light of constant renewal and regeneration. The drama staged on the beach, while it illustrates man’s vanity and vulnerability, may also express the poet’s realistic hope for a better future: “[…] life always finds // somewhere to whisper, thought a place to grow / […]”69. Rejectamenta are intrinsically poetic material whose numinous beauty can be converted into words. Thus the poet charts his individual relation to Earth through the poetic medium and through language. His earth is all at once frame (in the archaic or poetic sense of “the universe, or part of it, regarded as an embracing structure”70), mother, and repository, best apprehended from the liminal space of the shore looking out to the unbounded expanse of the sea: