Introduzione, a Irene De Angelis, "Oltre i confini. Orizzonti internazionali nella poesia di Derek Mahon"

“Where is Mahon in his poetry?” asked Brendan Kennelly in 1989 about the Humane Perspective which characterized this poet from Belfast. His answer was undoubtedly effective from the hermeneutical point of view: Derek Mahon seemed “a poet of the perimeter, meditating on the centre, with a mixture of amusement and pain” to the then professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College Dublin – a definition that should have been more strategically elaborated on by scholars. Irene De Angelis’s Mahonian essays do it and aptly show how his cosmopolitan perspectives from Japan, ancient Rome and China/India are not peripheral, but are rooted in the deepest core of his poetic experience.