My list of the top 100 Irish poems is getting shorter every week. Every week I publish a brief analysis of a random poem from this top 100 Irish poems list. This week I picked number 37 from the Irish poet Derek Mahon.
Who is Derek Mahon?
Derek Mahon was born in Belfast in 1941 and studied at Trinity College Dublin and at the Sorbonne in Paris. He resided in London for many years, working as a critic, adapting literary works for British television, and as poetry editor of the New Statesman. He later settled in Kinsale, Co. Cork, where he died in 2020. He is considered among the most proficient and influential of contemporary Irish writers.
What is the poem A Disused Shed in Co Wexford about?
At first glance, you would think it is something about a shed or a memory shared from a place where the poem lived. But the poem is more about the struggle people around the world have suffered from injustice, abandonment, catastrophe and other events.
Derek, who was also a journalist, wrote this poem right after Bloody Sunday. He links the mushrooms to the forgotten victims of history, from Treblinka to Pompeii, people still reaching for hope. In the last stanza Mahon speaks up to almost a calling to all those who labour for more and strive to be free of injustice. So yes, not just a poem about a shed in Co Wexford.
So let’s take a closer look at this Irish poem.nbsp;
A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford
BY DEREK MAHON
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
The poem starts with a list of forgotten corners of the world, then settles on one: an old shed in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel in Co. Wexford. Inside, a crowd of mushrooms has been growing in the dark for about fifty years, since around the time of the Irish Civil War, all straining towards the only light they have.
When a visitor finally opens the door with a camera, the mushrooms seem to plead not to be forgotten. Mahon turns them into a picture of all the lost and silenced people of history, and the poem ends as a call to remember them and give them a voice.
The poem is dedicated to the novelist J.G. Farrell, whose novel Troubles is set in a crumbling hotel in Co. Wexford. It first appeared in The Listener in 1973 and became the best-known poem of Mahon’s 1975 collection The Snow Party. Many readers rank it among the finest Irish poems of the twentieth century.
Read the full poem: A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford by Derek Mahon at the Poetry Foundation. You will also find it in The Poems: 1961-2020 (The Gallery Press).