Abstract

This article examines the complex manner in which Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon broach significant questions about the historicity of poetry, the ways in which it encounters or opens onto history. Whilst their work is open to political critique, indeed whatever their declared or implicit politics, both poets reflect consistently on what writing preserves and effaces, questions raised by two of Jacques Derrida's texts on poetry, "Che cos'è la poesia?" ("What is poetry?") and "Shibboleth: For Paul Celan".10 In the light of Derrida's notion of the poematic, and its relation to memory and the date, this essay considers how the poetry of Heaney and Mahon remembers "residually", engaging with the condition of writing 'in' history.