Zhou Ying, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Abstract
This article centers around irony in the poems of a leading Irish poet, Derek Mahon (1941-2020), and discusses how the typical Mahonian irony can be seen as a creative and resilient response to ingrained sectarianism, political tensions, riots, and violence in the Irish and Northern Irish context to date. This article will particularly emphasize how the poet’s use of irony presents the coexistence of mutually exclusive elements/perspectives/stances and opens up a path to honesty, subtlety, and artistic accuracy in chaotic social circumstances. This research also explores how the Mahonian irony offers a new way of negotiating identity, a word that highlights common nature and solidarity yet increasingly leads to controversy and separation in times of crisis. The employment of irony in Mahon’s poems works to frustrate the singular view and ultimately resist fixity in an overheated cultural environment. The Mahonian irony blurs the boundaries of English/Irish, Catholic/Protestant, Unionist/Nationalist experiences, destabilizes a settled vocabulary, and serves as a special embodiment of the poet’s resilient lyric appetite. In the following, we will see the irony in Mahon’s poems is not a mere modifier, but a lasting pattern that runs through the poet’s writing career; not necessarily a kind of escapism, but a form of involvement and emotional compatibility; not a problematic device, but a means of resisting black and white representation.
Keywords: Derek Mahon, irony, Irish poetry, times of crisis