ABSTRACT
These are exactly the sorts of tensions that Mahon’s work negotiates. His is partly, as Haughton puts it, ‘a poetry of place and critical resistance, responding to and resisting the tyranny of modernity’, which often displays a kind of ‘romantic humanism or metaphysical ecology’ (2007: 6). But, particularly in the collections published after Haughton’s landmark 2007 study, Mahon’s sense of ‘place and critical resistance’ has been increasingly problematised by the awareness of climate change. If Mahon ‘started out as a poet in resistance to his home place, he went on to become a uniquely compelling poet of other places without abandoning the notion of poetry as a form of resistance’. There
is ‘always an edge of political anger, and cultural critique in his work, born of a sense of damage that has become increasingly ecological’ (Haughton, 2007: 18). Mahon’s ironic tone and his awareness of global relations rupture any Romantic ecology which posits poem or landscape as a space which positively alters consciousness and conscience – Bate’s ‘imaginary parks’ which teach readers how to dwell. These imaginary parks are the sort of poetic spaces that Clark, Morton and other challengers of early ecocriticism have lambasted for de-coupling the potential for an alteration of consciousness from a detailed socio-political attention and critique. In the first section of this chapter I show how Mahon’s uneasy relationship
with place and history gives rise to an awareness of the marginalised and ignored, and how irony and style combine in a form of poetic thinking which challenges nationalist violence and then post-national cultural imperialism. The second section tracks Mahon’s emergent ecological sensibility, in particular how he imagines global interconnection and the relationship between economic and ecological systems. In the next section I return to irony in an ecological context, arguing that what makes Mahon’s work so interesting is that the same ironic consciousness that subverted simplistic atavisms in his early work comes up against the pieties and contradictions of contemporary green thinking. I read his work in the light of recent (eco)critical approaches which focus on the anxieties of an inadequate ecological consciousness in the era of climate change – particularly those of Szerszynski, Clark, Blühdorn and Morton. The final third of the chapter explores how Mahon’s treatment of some of the most recognisable phenomena of climate change – from wind farms and rising sea levels to Lovelock’s Gaia – offer a series of powerful challenges to readers interested in ecology and poetry. Mahon’s poetry makes a fascinating arena in which to explore the difficulties
faced by the contemporary, ecologically aware, liberal subject whose environmental concern is predicated upon notions of personal choice and agency that cannot necessarily cope with the radical aporias that climate change engenders. This is the arena Blühdorn has called a ‘simulative politics’. Simulative politics deceives itself into thinking that it takes action against the unsustainable ecological situation while actually failing to address the complexity of the issues at hand, therefore becoming complicit in sustaining the unsustainable. In other words, an environmentalist way of thinking
which had once been launched as a critical weapon against ideological deception has itself become ideological: it [simulative politics] tells a dubious story of eco-political oppression and alienation; it conceals the post-ecologist resolve to defend the ecologically exploitative and destructive system of democratic consumer capitalism.
