Sir, – I don't know which edition of Derek Mahon's New Collected PoemsFintan O'Toole had to hand when he wrote his Culture Shock column (Weekend Review, December 24th), but the last line of my copy of the same book is not "The only direction left is up".
Taking the book's Index of First Lines into account the last "line" in the book would appear to be "Your great mistake is to disregard the satire" (page 391), the first line of The Mute Phenomena(page 76). It is tempting to read this as a deliberate intervention on the poet's part. However, the last line of verse in the book is more likely to be the final line of Dreams of a Summer Night(page 377), which reads "light dancing on dawn water, the lives we live". O'Toole's error is also a missed opportunity. The poem ending with the line "The only direction left is up" (Shandon Bridge) reflects, in part, on the lives of those who benefit from the work of the Cork Simon Community. In a sense, then, it is nice to think of Mahon's book ending on such an optimistic note, but the real ending is not quite as positive as O'Toole suggests.
It is true to say that Dreams of a Summer Nightis a poem of quiet hope for the future, but it also embodies all of the anxieties about our contemporary reality that have made Mahon such a significant voice in Irish culture for nearly five decades. As he puts it in the same piece: "Drilling for oil and war we seldom register / the resilient silence strewn about our toes / and under our very noses".
“The only direction left is up”? Perhaps. But not before we really come to terms with “the resilient silence strewn about our toes / and under our very noses”. – Yours, etc,