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Against the Clock is at once piercingly satirical and coyly optimistic in its outlook. In line with award-winning collections Harbour Lights (2005) and Life on Earth (2008), this book intermingles nostalgia with a critical vision of contemporary culture and technological advances. It continues a trend in Mahon’s work of increasing political engagement; issues like climate change, globalization and migration are at the fore in poems replete with allusions and references.

Mahon’s spacious stanzas allow him room to explore a diverse array of subjects, ranging from data usage to nuclear waste.  This range is evident in a poem like ‘Domestic Interior’, a masterly study of modern love. It opens with the conversational couplet “You check your iPhone for the latest news/while I catch up with today’s newspaper” before scanning through a dizzy array of twenty-first century ills, from the decay of “the oceans and rainforests” to “fury and fascism”. . This is the work of a poet who sees a connection between macro-issues of the internet and everyday human relationships. The domestic interior of the poem’s title gradually comes alive with external problems that coincide with the inter-personal. It ends with a prayer of sympathy: “ghost of a butterfly, light-lover/forgive our failure”’ suggesting the redemptive nature of the relationship at the heart of the poem.

Beyond the butterfly, several other “ghosts” float in and out of this collection. Those familiar with recent collections An Autumn Wind and Somewhere the Wave will be unsurprised to see the presence of exiled writers like Jean Rhys and Ovid. Yeats is also a familiar touchstone for Mahon. From the poet’s own ‘Prayer for My Daughter’ in A Birthday, to the mystical “life force from the past” that concludes his meditation on environmental destruction in ‘The Rain Forest’,the foreboding Yeatsian mysticism of ‘A Second Coming’ is never far from Mahon’s thoughts as he looks to the future.

While wide-ranging in its subject matter, Against the Clock is also a very personal collection. We see glimpses into Mahon’s anxiety about death in the title poem. In this poem, which opens the collection, the poet is seen writing “to a final deadline”. In more tender moments, reflections on family and childhood occupy poems like the excellent ‘Data’.

The poems, despite their contemporary topics, maintain a commitment to traditional form. Whilst this has been levelled as a weakness by some critics who see Mahon as outdated, the reconciliation of formal tradition with modern content is in fact one of the strengths of this collection. The contrast between subject and form allows for tensions which exaggerate the shift between past and present to emerge.

Mahon constantly returns to the question of poetry’s relevance in this collection. Many of these poems ask what the role of poetry is in the Trump-era of fake news and misinformation. Mahon seemingly answered  this question emphatically in one of the major highlights of his previous collection Rising Late. “I would become, in the time left to me,/the servant of a restored reality,” he writes. And it is perhaps this that we must also take away from Against the Clock, a sense of a poet still at the height of his powers engaging head on with twenty-first century crises with wonderfully restorative wit and insight.