Derek Mahon has been the recipient of numerous awards for his poetry, plays, and translations, including the Irish Academy of Letters Award and the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Poetry Prize. But since the early 1970s he has also had an active career as a critic and reviewer. In this selection from Mahon's prose writings, as Brown points out in his Introduction, a "poet of rare distinction reflects on a wide variety of literary and social matters which a career of prolific literary journalism has brought to his attention. In them we may find not only his views on and responses to (the subjects at hand)...but something of himself, something of the poet whose verse must always command our primary attention".The first section presents Mahon's writings on Irish writers, from Yeats, Wilde, Joyce, MacNeice, and Beckett, to such contemporary figures as Brian Moore, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Paul Durcan. The next section gathers some of Mahon's observations on French literature, long a strong interest of his, and includes both major and minor novelists and poets -- Eluard, Bonnefoy, Alain-Fournier, Ciline, Sartre, Camus, and Weil.Mahon then turns to a diverse group of Alain 18th-century English-language literary figures, such as Raymond Chandler, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Lowell, Malcolm Lowery, Anthony Burgess, J.P Donleavy, Jay McInerney, and Samuel Menashe, and explores their craft and artistic inspirations. The final section presents a series of profiles of persons and places, from Ireland to France, to New York and San Francisco.