An Ironist’s “Final Vocabulary”: Derek Mahon’s Re-Visions

Critics tend to cast a suspicious eye on Derek Mahon’s seemingly obsessive revisions of his works. Though it needs to be acknowledged that Mahon’s habitual practice of revision does not always lead to a definite improvement of the poems’ quality, this article argues that the poet revises to destabilize a formation of what Richard Rorty calls “final vocabulary” as a never quitting ironist. Mahon’s constant undercutting of his stable textual ground stems from a deeper Mahonian poetics which has at its core the urge to work against fixed perspective and settled interpretation in unsettling political and cultural circumstances that produce intolerance and claustrophobia. Mahon also presents a Beckettian resistance of the limitedness of poetic language by pluralizing poetic ambivalence and indeterminacy.