Longtime fans of the Irish poet Derek Mahon had to laugh when, in the spring of 2020, he unexpectedly went viral. As part of an Instagram series organized by the Game of Thrones actress Emilia Clarke to provide “poetry for the heart and soul” during the pandemic, another superstar, Andrew Scott, read aloud Mahon’s poem “Everything is Going to Be All Right.” Always an anomaly in Mahon’s grumpy, enigmatic oeuvre, the poem’s bland reassurances earned more than four million views. And perhaps some of the viewers, searching for further uplift, ordered Mahon’s The Poems (1961–2020). There, in “Against the Clock,” they would have found a more typical sentiment:
There are those grim moments when you think
contemporary paper games too daft for you,
not serious, and real values on the brink—
a naff culture not worth contributing to,
time to go back on the drink.
The last line is grimly startling, given the frankness with which Mahon has recorded his struggles with alcoholism.
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