The act of choosing a poem--a poem of singular achievement and lasting critical significance--makes untimely readers of us all. We must try to think of such a poem at once inside and outside time, speaking profoundly of its moment of writing yet able to transcend it to achieve lasting importance. In turn, we make a profession of faith concerning the poem that will last--the 'news that stays news.' To this extent we are concerned with the work isolated from its maker; we assess the ability of the single poem to stand alone and to offer its own particular meanings. Yet we are also aware of it as typical (or not) of a poet's oeuvre. In short, we engage in contradictory readings and approaches. Paradoxically, it is this very feature of the process that makes the choice of Derek Mahon's 'A Disused Shed in Co Wexford' a fittingly complex one, both in its own organic processes and in the relationship it bears to Mahon's body of work as a whole.
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