Derek Mahon’s Anti-capitalist Ecologies

Literary critics have generally cast Derek Mahon as a humanist in dialogue with existentialist themes, or as a poet of exile, while highlighting the qualities of irony and skepticism that permeate his work. This paper is receptive to such readings, but proposes an alternative emphasis, situating Mahon as an anti-capitalist writer, his poetic ventures often serving to critique and counteract what he called “the bedlam of acquisitive force / That rules us, and would rule the universe” (2018a: 59). This discussion surveys Mahon’s long-standing respect for a variety of anti-capitalist poets and thinkers, from Brecht and Pasolini to Naomi Klein; sheds light on his penetrating investigations of warfare and ecological despoliation as offshoots of imperial and capitalist expansion; and explores his advocacy of poetry as a corrective to what he viewed as the glib commercialism and intellectual complacencies accompanying market-driven globalization, or in his words, “the explosive growth of high finance / directing thought” (2020h: 67). Over the course of this paper, my objective is to present a “new” Mahon: a poet whose self-described “left-wingery” informed, and found expression in, his work and practice (2017d: 82).