Derek Mahon: A Garage in Co. Cork

Length / Form:    Eight six-line stanzas

Allusion to Classical Figure: Ovid, Apollo, Baucis and Philemon (changed into petrol pumps instead of trees), Daphne (‘The virgin who escaped his dark design’).

Classical/post-Classical Intertexts:  The image of Baucis and Philemon, transformed into petrol pumps, is inspired by a postcard produced by the photographer Fritz Curzon, named ‘McGrotty’s Garage’. (See p.186 in H. Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.)

Relationship to Classical Text  Mahon refers to episodes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (book 1, 452ff and book 8, 600ff).

Further comment:  The poem imagines a metamorphosis through decay. The Garage, once a functional, albeit rustic, image of modernity, now represents the ‘antiquities of the recent past’, mythologised and monumentalised through Mahon’s poem.