The Yellow Book. This item is unavailable.The Yellow Book

In The Yellow Book, the home-seeking traveler--"a decadent who lived to tell the story"--finds lodgings in our fierce fin de siècle under the roof of his Dublin attic flat. Amid echoes from dead writers, "clouds of unknowing" from his "last Camel," and ghosts from his own life, the poet muses wisely and wittily on our wound-down decade and expiring double millennium. These twenty-one absorbing, sometimes mordantly funny, and always delightful meditations offer us both the distinctive details of our shared lives and a theoptic view from "windows flung wide on briny balconies/above an ocean of roofs and lighthouse beams;/like a storm lantern the wintry planet swings." ("Night Thought")

Derek Mahon was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1941 and was educated at Trinity College in Dublin and at the Sorbonne in Paris. Wake Forest published three of his volumes: The Hunt by Night (1982, redesigned in 1995), The Hudson Letter (1996), and The Yellow Book (1998), as well as his translation of Philippe Jaccottet's Selected Poems in 1988. He has written many volumes of poetry, translations, and plays, and edited The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1990) and Modern Irish Poetry (1972). His many honors include the Irish American Foundation Award, a Lannan Foundation Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the Arts Council Bursary, the Eric Gregory Award, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature.