'Sententious solitude'? Figures of the poet in the work of Derek Mahon

Derek Mahon is discussed as a poet who - like Louis MacNeice - addresses public themes in a distinctively personal idiom. The main focus is on three poems: 'Ovid in Tomis', 'Going Home' and 'An Bonnan Bui'. Mahon suggests the necessarily complex and self-divided nature of poetic utterance, which is bound up with and depends on forms of exile and self-exile.