Derek Mahon

I was sad to hear of the death, on Thursday, of Derek Mahon, some of whose collections, most notably The Hunt By Night (OUP, 1982) and An Autumn Wind (Gallery Press, 2010) are among my very favourites. He was a supremely elegant poet. I had the bad luck to have missed his spell as writer-in-residence at the University of Ulster at Coleraine by a matter of months: he left at the end of the 1984/85 academic year and I arrived in September 1985. Over at The High Window, David Cooke has re-posted an excellent overview of Mahon’s career.