In attesa della vita. Introduzione alla poetica di Derek Mahon

When Seamus Heaney was awarded The Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, the intense creative season of Irish literature in the last decades of the twentieth century was awarded with him. Derek Mahon (Belfast 1941-) was one of the more important protagonists of that season: in his poetical work, he explores the contradictory experience of waiting for a vraie vie beyond the “given life”; he observes the most secluded and unheard-of recesses of reality from a cosmopolitan perspective. Not rarely, he is considered as “a better poet than Heaney”. This volume, which is the first monograph ever on Derek Mahon, is divided into two parts: the first one delineates his biographical and creative trajectory and synthesizes the different phases of his development in order to show the profile of the macrotext of his work; the second one examines his first poetry collection (Night-Crossing, 1968) according to the hermeneutical approach of “cumulative reading”, which generates “an experience that is macrotextual and sequential at the same time, i.e., both vertical and horizontal”.