This volume of 14 essays offers and account and assesment of Derek Mahon's work. They demonstrate the variety and complexity of Mahon's work, a poetry of the "ironic conscience", sceptical, sophisticated, urbane; a poetry of transit between centres and margins. It breaks with a nationalist or regionalist thematics yet remains engaged with questions of identity, "belonging", tradition and history. It identifies with outsiders, maverick, "the unreconciled, in their metaphysical pain". It includes some of the best poems of the Troubles, yet reflects a basically metaphysical, universal frame of reference. It ranges widely in time and space, yet excels in the minute particularising of human experience and the phenomenal world.