*****

Derek Mahon: The Adaptations (1975–2020) • Helen Mort: The Illustrated Woman • Carole Satyamurti: The Hopeful Hat • Richie McCaffery: Summer/Break • River Wolton: Year • Mark Roper:  Beyond Stillness 

*****
The Adaptations (1975–2020) by Derek Mahon. The Gallery Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-9-1133-8420. Reviewed by Sam Milne

One of Ireland’s finest poets, Derek Mahon was also one of her finest translators of poetry, as this book from The Gallery Press clearly shows. In a very interesting Afterword to the collection, published posthumously, Mahon writes honestly that in his ‘translations’ he has ‘taken many liberties, in the hope that the results will read almost like original poems in English’ (his emphasis), an openness that is not always acknowledged by poetry-translators (as is the case in Robert Lowell’s Imitations, for example). He reinforces this point by stating that the poems ‘aren’t translations, in the…