Second wind …

… Against the Clock review: fizzingly exuberant poems. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The writing in these poems is not really “late style”, as considered by Edward Said in his book of that title, which, in Said’s version of it, tends to generate masterpieces that nevertheless are broken or incomplete – the Aeneid, Bach’s final fugue, Proust’s À la recherche – but rather a return to earlier powers. There is nothing in late Mahon of Yeats’s “why should not old men be mad?”, for although the poems in Against the Clock return again and again to the theme of age and ageing – “Now that you’re seventy-five,/sails idly fluttering . . .” – there is a youthful spring to the metre, and an almost boyish, mischievous joy in the handling of language and the devising of imagery …