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Derek Mahon: IV; ‘shiver in your tenement’

Poem Title

Original Publication

CP Page no

IV; ‘shiver in your tenement’

The Yellow Book, Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1997

230-231

Allusion to Classical figure ‘the satiric or lyric Muse’, Mnemosyne

Classical/post-Classical intertexts ‘Mnemosyne, mother of nine, dust at St Patrick’s’ recalls Irish poet Austin Clarke’s poem sequence Mnemosyne Lay in Dust (Dublin: P. Dolmen; London, Oxford University Press, 1966). The sequence is based on Austin’s personal experience of a mental breakdown, when he became a patient at St Patrick’s hospital in Dublin (where Mahon himself had been hospitalized due to alcoholism).

Derek Mahon