The late Michael Longley told of how, one Saturday morning in the middle of the 1970s, when tribal warfare in Northern Ireland was becoming bloodier by the day, and even more so by the night, he and his wife, the literary critic and academic Edna Longley, were having a weekend lie-in, when he heard from below the rattle of the letter box. He put on his dressing gown and padded downstairs — I can see him, that big soft shambling gentle man — and collected a sheaf of letters and bills, and returned to sit in bed propped against pillows, with his spectacles teetering on the end of his nose, which is how in my memory he always wore them. On one of the envelopes he recognized the handwriting of his friend and fellow poet Derek Mahon. Accompanied by a brief covering note, Derek had sent a poem fresh from the smelter. It was “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.” Michael read it, read it again, then in an awful silence let the sheet of paper fall from his hand. Edna asked him what was the matter. He sighed grimly and said, “I’m giving up poetry.” This was not the first instance I had of the depth of the rivalry — friendly, sort of — that smoldered amongst the remarkable generation of Northern Ireland poets born just before the war and in the decade or so after, a generation that included Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Medbh McGuckian, Seamus Deane, Ciaran Carson, Frank Ormsby, Tom Paulin, James Simmons, Gerald Dawe, and Paul Muldoon, a list which is by no means exhaustive. Note the preponderance of men. Plus ça change. The phenomenon of so much poetic talent erupting — and there was the sense of a volcanic event taking place — is surely remarkable, if not unprecedented. There was of course the unsettling thought that the poetry and the violence might be gushing up from the same creative depths. I put the possibility to Seamus Deane, in trepidation and not without a sense of daring — it was a question, in those troubled days, if we in the South had any right to offer our thoughts or opinions on the burgeoning Northern disaster. Seamus was born in the Bogside — a radical republican area of Derry city which at the time was under more or less permanent siege by Protestant extremists — and therefore knew a thing or two about the subterranean forces at work in his homeplace. His theory as to the inspiration for so much literary activity on his side of the border was far simpler and far more prosaic than any of my dark speculations. According to him, the phenomenon was mainly due to the Northern Ireland Education Act of 1947, which, despite thunderous protests by the Protestant Orange Order and some Unionist politicians, provided increased support for education generally and for Catholic schools in particular — as Seamus wryly observed, “They graciously allowed us to get an education.” Certainly the Northern poets knew their stuff. Longley was a fine classicist, Heaney and Ciaran Carson would both produce translations of Dante, Mahon knew the French poets in French, and Deane was to become one of the finest literary critics of the time; and the rest were no intellectual slouches either. While the sons and daughters of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in the South were pinned under the yoke of the Catholic Church, which dominated the education system in the Republic, the Northerners were benefitting from the postwar British determination to provide equal opportunity at all levels of society. Needless to say, the reformers could not prevail against the rigidity of the English class system, but while the going was good they did many and very good things. Were writers in the South shocked by the quantity and the quality of the work that suddenly started pouring out of the North? Certainly the poets were — shocked, and envious. One of them, whom I shall not name, from an earlier generation, born at the end of the 1920s, carried a bitter lifelong resentment, frequently and vociferously expressed, of Seamus Heaney’s lavish successes. But then the internecine struggle among the Northerners themselves was in some instances almost on a par with the warfare going on in the streets of Belfast. Years ago, at a literary festival somewhere abroad, we were being brought on a tour of local beauty spots, and one of the party — I shall not name him either — when he learned that Heaney was on the bus, refused to board and went off and got drunk by himself. Anyone familiar with Derek Mahon’s work will understand Longley’s reaction that Saturday morning in what the newspapers used to refer to lip-smackingly — the hacks do like a good scrap — as “war-torn Belfast,” when he first read “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.” It is, simply, though it is not simple, one of the finest poems, if not indeed the finest, written in Ireland since the death of Yeats. Mahon himself came to resent the poem for what he saw as its vulgar popularity; on stage once I urged him to read it to the audience, to which he responded with a cold stare and a curt refusal. I, of course, could have kicked myself for my crassness: never ask a poet to have another go at a lollipop that long ago has been licked down to the stick. But what a marvel it is. Mahon had accompanied his friend, the novelist J.G. Farrell, on a field trip to research the latter’s novel Troubles. On a stretch of coast in County Wexford they came upon the ruins of a burnt-out hotel, the once grand Ocean View, where in a tumbledown shed Among the bathtubs and the washbasins A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole. In the poem, the mushrooms become a symbol for universal suffering: They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way, To do
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