[3] President of Ireland Michael D Higgins said of Mahon; "he shared with his northern peers the capacity to link the classical and the contemporary but he brought also an edge that was unsparing of cruelty and wickedness.

His parents could not see the point of poetry, but he set out to prove them wrong after he won his school's Forrest Reid Memorial Prize for the poem 'The power that gives the water breath'.

[6] Mahon pursued third level studies at Trinity College Dublin in French, English, and Philosophy[7] and where he edited Icarus, and formed many friendships with writers such as Michael Longley, Eavan Boland and Brendan Kennelly.

[12] Mahon features on the Irish Leaving Certificate course with ten of his poems (Grandfather, Day Trip to Donegal, Ecclesiastes, After the Titanic, As It Should Be, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, Rathlin, The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush, Kinsale and Antarctica)[1].

Thoroughly educated and with a keen understanding of literary tradition, Mahon came out of the tumult of Northern Ireland with a formal, moderate, even restrained poetic voice.

Even the Irish landscape itself is never all that far from the classical tradition, as in his poem "Achill": He has also explored the genre of ekphrasis: the poetic reinterpretation of visual art.