Island Visions: Derek Mahon’s Cyclades

Abstract

This chapter opens with the theoretical framework of Part I (Travel and Landscape): notions of travel and tourism, old and new philhellenism (David Roessel), island and mainland, classifying Mahon’s and Heaney’s writing accordingly. It looks closely at Mahon’s travels to Greek islands (mainly Paros) and related poems written in 1970–1997, from an early evocation of the dictatorship in Greece juxtaposed with the Northern Irish conflict in Beyond Howth Head to the late image of the Cyclades as the poet’s spiritual centre in The Yellow Book. Mahon appears to represent, for the most part, new philhellenism and to mock tourist conventions, but his engagement with the Greek “paradise” is fundamentally intimate. His “Cycladic” poems constitute an astonishing contrast to his Cavafy translations revolving around prisons.