[New-Poetry] Mahon and MacNeice

[JforJames at aol.com]

_http://books.guardian.co.uk/poetry/features/0,,1826024,00.html_ 
(http://books.guardian.co.uk/poetry/features/0,,1826024,00.html) 
A  sense of place 
 
Derek Mahon's work is often linked with that of his Northern Irish peers,  
Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley. But he argues that Belfast's literary  
tradition has deeper roots 
 
Nicholas Wroe
Saturday July 22, 2006
The Guardian 
 

In September 1963 Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley  visited the 
County Down grave of the great Northern Irish poet Louis MacNeice,  who had 
died a short time before. Longley, writing recently in the introduction  to a 
selection of MacNeice's poems, recalled that as they "dawdled between the  
graves" all three then-unpublished poets were silently "contemplating an elegy".  
When they next met, Mahon read them "In Carrowdore Churchyard": "Your ashes 
will  not stir, even on this high ground / However the wind tugs, the headstones 
 shake". Seamus Heaney started to read his poem but "then crumpled it up".  
Longley says he decided not even to attempt the task. "Mahon had produced the  
definitive elegy."
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