Poems 1968-1998. Paul Muldoon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2001

The appearance of a volume of collected poems is an indication not only of a poet’s status with his or her publishers but of his claims to canonization. In many cases, of course, the poet so honored has reached an age where it is more natural to look backwards than forwards. But if, as is the case with Paul Muldoon, he is a young man of fifty, to travesty Joyce, there is every reason to look both ways. With eight full-length volumes and a number of pamphlets to his credit, Muldoon has certainly produced a body of work impressive enough to justify retrospection. [1] At the same time, Muldoon’s continuing productivity provides every reason to see the handsome volume now published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux [2] as a stepping-stone to yet more explorations of the highly personal poetic domain that he has claimed: earlier this year, he published his third libretto (a “nightmare cabaret opera”), Vera of Las Vegas, and only last year Oxford brought out his engrossing if somewhat idiosyncratic Clarendon lectures, To Ireland, I.

          At a first glance, Muldoon’s credentials may look suspiciously like those of Seamus Heaney. Both poets come from two small Northern Irish places not very far from each other though perhaps the reputedly Italianate layout of Muldoon’s Moy gives an indication of his penchant for linguistic extravaganza whereas Heaney ’s Mossbawn is more firmly situated in pure Irish soi and hence more suited to old-fashioned. Both poets left their rural background to attend Queen’s University, Belfast; Heaney early enough to be Muldoon’s tutor. Both did a stint of ordinary work – Heaney as a schoolmaster, Muldoon as a BBC producer – before returning to academe as highly successful professors of rhetoric and creative writing, Heaney at Harvard, Muldoon at Princeton. Both have proceeded to be elected Professors of Poetry at Oxford; Muldoon is now in the third year of his five-year appointment.  Yet, for all these similarities and for all the intertextual links that connect the two poets to each other, it has perhaps not always been sufficiently pointed out that the influence works both ways: future studies of the two poet’s works are likely to list not only list ‘H., influence on M.’ but  also ‘M., influence on H.’

          More imp ortantly, Heaney’s observation in an early review that Muldoon “chang[ed] the rules of the game” should be taken as an indication of the real differences that also exist between the lyrical temperaments of these two kindred spirits. With hindsight, it is easy to see that Muldoon created the standards by which his poetry should be judged more or less at the moment when his first volume was published. If this is less true of his peculiar idiom (which maybe appears in its mature form only in his second volume), it is certainly true of his invention of the structure of the Muldoon collection. All of Muldoon’s major volumes follow a pattern established by the first one: a sequence of short poems followed by a long poem, which, at least in the later volumes, subtly comments on themes and conceits employed in earlier poems. One of the particular pleasures of opening a new  volume by Muldoon has always been to discover the ways in which it employs and varies this pattern. In recent volumes, this has led to complexities which are probably as hard to keep in one’s mind as the 4096 possible movements of thought which Empson calculated that Shakespeare’s sonnet 94 yields: thus, for example, each of the thirty sonnets that make up the concluding long poem of Hay  uses six of the ninety rhyme words from “Yarrow”, the 150-page final poem of The Annals of Chile. A drawback of the Poems 1968-1998 for a reader spoilt by Muldoon’s penchant for compositional devices is of course that, unlike the Selected and New Selected Poems, it prints the poems in the exact order of their original publication and thus deprives us of the frisson of new rearrangements. Another, perhaps more important drawback is that the format has prevented inclusion of poems available only in the pamphlets that have appeared from time to time in Ireland: thus, while the New Selected Poems contains the remarkable poem “The Ox” (originally published in The Wishbone in 1984), Poems 1968-1998 does not. (Muldoon is apparently alert to the possibility of criticism on this point since in an author’s note he makes a distinction between the present volume and a truly “collected” volume which would include “uncollected work”.)

          If this account of the almost mathematical subtleties of some of Muldoon’s rhyming patterns make them sound a bit like the music of the spheres – it’s there all right but you can’t hear it – it should be added immediately that he also excels in other, far more accessible techniques. In fact, one of his most notable achievements is his use of the sonnet, which has been a fixture of his work almost from the beginning. A case in point is “The Sightseers”:

            My father and mother, my brother and sister

                and I, with uncle Pat, our dour best-loved uncle,

                had set out that Sunday afternoon in July

                in his broken-down Ford

                one of fever, another’s knees turned to jelly–

                but the brand-new roundabout at Ballygawley,

                the first in mid-Ulster.

                Uncle Pat was telling us how the B-Specials

                had stopped him one night somewhere near Ballygawley

                and smashed his bicycle

                and made him sing the Sash and curse the Pope or Rome.

                They held a pistol so hard against his forehead

            there was still the mark of an O when he got home.

          Apart from demonstrating Muldoon’s skill at exploiting a conventional literary form and putting it to new use, this poem also shows that there is far more to his work than mere technical ingenuity, as has sometimes been alleged, most notably by Helen Vendler. “The Sightseers” manages to fuse the anecdotal and the quotidian with political reality, establishing a horrifying parallel between the roundabout which the family naively sets out to admire and “the mark of an O” which is the visible sign of oppression and humiliation. Muldoon’s indirect way of tackling political topics is on display throughout his work though perhaps never so successfully and horrifyingly as in the long poem “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants”. Interestingly, this poem is really a sequence of 49 sonnets, each constituent item loosely based on some detail gleaned from one of the 49 episodes of the Winnebago Trickster Cycle. [3] At the same time, the sequence is a virtuoso performance of Bakhtinian heteroglossia, its register ranging from the hackneyed phrases of news items reporting the latest atrocities in Northern Ireland to adaptations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

          The superimposition of New World legends on contemporary Northern Irish reality is a telling example of Muldoon’s mythic method, and not the only of its kind in Poems 1968-1998. What makes Muldoon’s method different from that of his predecessors in the field is the playful, tangential manner in which points of contact are established or recognized. The baleful encounter with the Other seemingly promised by the title of Meeting the British, Muldoon’s fifth collection, turns out to take place in Canada between participants in the wars between Pontiac and the British. In similar fashion, other poems indirectly link the history of Ireland with, say, The Annals of Chile (the title of the seventh volume), often in ways which intrigue not only the reader but sometimes, it seems, also the speaker of the poem. (The ability to strike a bemused, puzzled tone is surely one of the most characteristic features of the Muldoonesque manner.) What this amounts to in many cases is a powerful version of that Irish specialty––the poetry of place––of which Muldoon is a pastmaster. Of particular interest in this context is often the role played by etymology. Sometimes the reader has an uncanny feeling that Language itself colludes with the poet in creating words and names solely for the purpose of making a Muldoon poem possible, as in the wonderful sonnet “The Right Arm” where the speaker, with a curious combination of tenses, states that he would give his “right arm to have known then / how Eglish was itself wedged between / ecclesia and église” (Eglish being a real place where Muldoon lived as an infant).

          Wordplay such as that on the near-identity of English and Eglish (and the implications of its similarity to two Latin and French words) is obviously natural in a country where borders, their crossing, their creation or obliteration is a matter of great concern. Muldoon’s collections abound in variations on this theme. A classic instance is “The Boundary Commission” where the border runs down the middle of the village street and where the way in which a shower of rain stops cleanly across the lane is indicated by the very break of the stanza. In the later collections, this problematic has resulted in concrete poems, in the form of either maps or ingenious pattern poems, again involving sophisticated wordplay.

          It has been suggested earlier in this review that Muldoon’s poetic sensibility is one which incorporates emotions recollected in tranquility in its exuberant play with historical, geographical, or linguistic parallelisms and that those who, like Helen Vendler, want their Heraclitus neat, so to speak, might be disappointed by the impurity and indirection of Muldoon’s discourse. Nevertheless,  it should be added that in his more recent work there are striking examples of poems occasioned by and expressing experiences of an elemental human nature. The Annals of Chile, for example, contains both the masterly long elegy “Incantata” written for the poet’s former lover Mary Farl Powers and shorter poems celebrating the birth of a daughter; in all these poems, Muldoon certainly succeeds in voicing common human experiences while remaining faithful to his predilection for technical complexity. The most recent collection to date, Hay, also includes technically accomplished poems on everyday themes. “The Mudroom”, one of this reviewer’s personal favorites, is a playful inventory of the sediments of family life which it manages to link to a wide variety of cultural and geographical references, all of them bearing witness to Muldoon’s extensive vocabulary and technical virtuosity. “Sleeve Notes” is a miniature autobiography which, in the manner of “The More a Man Has” and “Madoc”, takes its cues from recordings of rock bands dear to the poet. There is a long sequence of rhymed “Hopewell Haiku”, poetic snapshots of the poet, his family, and his cats at home in New Jersey. There are sestinas, a ghazal, a pantoum, and, as mentioned, a sonnet sequence. The mood is often relaxed, with perhaps an occasional hint of wickedness as the poet looks back on his early youth, but there are also––and this bodes well for the future––indications of the professional’s never-tiring preoccupation with the inflaming moment of inspiration, as in the title-poem:

            This much I know. Just as I’m about to make that right turn

                off Province Line Road

                I meet another beat-up Volvo

                carrying a load

                of hay. (More accurately, a bale of lucerne

                on the roof rack,

                a bale of lucerne or fescue or alafalfa.)

                My hands are raw. I’m itching to cut the twine, to unpack

                that hay-accordion, that hay-concertina.

                It must be ten o’clock. There’s still enough light

                (not least from the glow

                of the bales themselves) for a body to ascertain

                that when one bursts, as now, something takes flight

                from those hot-and-heavy box pleats. This much I know.

The appearance of a volume of collected poems is an indication not only of a poet’s status with his or her publishers but of his claims to canonization. In many cases, of course, the poet so honored has reached an age where it is more natural to look backwards than forwards. But if, as is the case with Paul Muldoon, he is a young man of fifty, to travesty Joyce, there is every reason to look both ways. With eight full-length volumes and a number of pamphlets to his credit, Muldoon has certainly produced a body of work impressive enough to justify retrospection. [1] At the same time, Muldoon’s continuing productivity provides every reason to see the handsome volume now published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux [2] as a stepping-stone to yet more explorations of the highly personal poetic domain that he has claimed: earlier this year, he published his third libretto (a “nightmare cabaret opera”), Vera of Las Vegas, and only last year Oxford brought out his engrossing if somewhat idiosyncratic Clarendon lectures, To Ireland, I.

          At a first glance, Muldoon’s credentials may look suspiciously like those of Seamus Heaney. Both poets come from two small Northern Irish places not very far from each other though perhaps the reputedly Italianate layout of Muldoon’s Moy gives an indication of his penchant for linguistic extravaganza whereas Heaney ’s Mossbawn is more firmly situated in pure Irish soi and hence more suited to old-fashioned. Both poets left their rural background to attend Queen’s University, Belfast; Heaney early enough to be Muldoon’s tutor. Both did a stint of ordinary work – Heaney as a schoolmaster, Muldoon as a BBC producer – before returning to academe as highly successful professors of rhetoric and creative writing, Heaney at Harvard, Muldoon at Princeton. Both have proceeded to be elected Professors of Poetry at Oxford; Muldoon is now in the third year of his five-year appointment.  Yet, for all these similarities and for all the intertextual links that connect the two poets to each other, it has perhaps not always been sufficiently pointed out that the influence works both ways: future studies of the two poet’s works are likely to list not only list ‘H., influence on M.’ but  also ‘M., influence on H.’

          More imp ortantly, Heaney’s observation in an early review that Muldoon “chang[ed] the rules of the game” should be taken as an indication of the real differences that also exist between the lyrical temperaments of these two kindred spirits. With hindsight, it is easy to see that Muldoon created the standards by which his poetry should be judged more or less at the moment when his first volume was published. If this is less true of his peculiar idiom (which maybe appears in its mature form only in his second volume), it is certainly true of his invention of the structure of the Muldoon collection. All of Muldoon’s major volumes follow a pattern established by the first one: a sequence of short poems followed by a long poem, which, at least in the later volumes, subtly comments on themes and conceits employed in earlier poems. One of the particular pleasures of opening a new  volume by Muldoon has always been to discover the ways in which it employs and varies this pattern. In recent volumes, this has led to complexities which are probably as hard to keep in one’s mind as the 4096 possible movements of thought which Empson calculated that Shakespeare’s sonnet 94 yields: thus, for example, each of the thirty sonnets that make up the concluding long poem of Hay  uses six of the ninety rhyme words from “Yarrow”, the 150-page final poem of The Annals of Chile. A drawback of the Poems 1968-1998 for a reader spoilt by Muldoon’s penchant for compositional devices is of course that, unlike the Selected and New Selected Poems, it prints the poems in the exact order of their original publication and thus deprives us of the frisson of new rearrangements. Another, perhaps more important drawback is that the format has prevented inclusion of poems available only in the pamphlets that have appeared from time to time in Ireland: thus, while the New Selected Poems contains the remarkable poem “The Ox” (originally published in The Wishbone in 1984), Poems 1968-1998 does not. (Muldoon is apparently alert to the possibility of criticism on this point since in an author’s note he makes a distinction between the present volume and a truly “collected” volume which would include “uncollected work”.)

          If this account of the almost mathematical subtleties of some of Muldoon’s rhyming patterns make them sound a bit like the music of the spheres – it’s there all right but you can’t hear it – it should be added immediately that he also excels in other, far more accessible techniques. In fact, one of his most notable achievements is his use of the sonnet, which has been a fixture of his work almost from the beginning. A case in point is “The Sightseers”:

            My father and mother, my brother and sister

                and I, with uncle Pat, our dour best-loved uncle,

                had set out that Sunday afternoon in July

                in his broken-down Ford

                one of fever, another’s knees turned to jelly–

                but the brand-new roundabout at Ballygawley,

                the first in mid-Ulster.

                Uncle Pat was telling us how the B-Specials

                had stopped him one night somewhere near Ballygawley

                and smashed his bicycle

                and made him sing the Sash and curse the Pope or Rome.

                They held a pistol so hard against his forehead

            there was still the mark of an O when he got home.

          Apart from demonstrating Muldoon’s skill at exploiting a conventional literary form and putting it to new use, this poem also shows that there is far more to his work than mere technical ingenuity, as has sometimes been alleged, most notably by Helen Vendler. “The Sightseers” manages to fuse the anecdotal and the quotidian with political reality, establishing a horrifying parallel between the roundabout which the family naively sets out to admire and “the mark of an O” which is the visible sign of oppression and humiliation. Muldoon’s indirect way of tackling political topics is on display throughout his work though perhaps never so successfully and horrifyingly as in the long poem “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants”. Interestingly, this poem is really a sequence of 49 sonnets, each constituent item loosely based on some detail gleaned from one of the 49 episodes of the Winnebago Trickster Cycle. [3] At the same time, the sequence is a virtuoso performance of Bakhtinian heteroglossia, its register ranging from the hackneyed phrases of news items reporting the latest atrocities in Northern Ireland to adaptations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

          The superimposition of New World legends on contemporary Northern Irish reality is a telling example of Muldoon’s mythic method, and not the only of its kind in Poems 1968-1998. What makes Muldoon’s method different from that of his predecessors in the field is the playful, tangential manner in which points of contact are established or recognized. The baleful encounter with the Other seemingly promised by the title of Meeting the British, Muldoon’s fifth collection, turns out to take place in Canada between participants in the wars between Pontiac and the British. In similar fashion, other poems indirectly link the history of Ireland with, say, The Annals of Chile (the title of the seventh volume), often in ways which intrigue not only the reader but sometimes, it seems, also the speaker of the poem. (The ability to strike a bemused, puzzled tone is surely one of the most characteristic features of the Muldoonesque manner.) What this amounts to in many cases is a powerful version of that Irish specialty––the poetry of place––of which Muldoon is a pastmaster. Of particular interest in this context is often the role played by etymology. Sometimes the reader has an uncanny feeling that Language itself colludes with the poet in creating words and names solely for the purpose of making a Muldoon poem possible, as in the wonderful sonnet “The Right Arm” where the speaker, with a curious combination of tenses, states that he would give his “right arm to have known then / how Eglish was itself wedged between / ecclesia and église” (Eglish being a real place where Muldoon lived as an infant).

          Wordplay such as that on the near-identity of English and Eglish (and the implications of its similarity to two Latin and French words) is obviously natural in a country where borders, their crossing, their creation or obliteration is a matter of great concern. Muldoon’s collections abound in variations on this theme. A classic instance is “The Boundary Commission” where the border runs down the middle of the village street and where the way in which a shower of rain stops cleanly across the lane is indicated by the very break of the stanza. In the later collections, this problematic has resulted in concrete poems, in the form of either maps or ingenious pattern poems, again involving sophisticated wordplay.

          It has been suggested earlier in this review that Muldoon’s poetic sensibility is one which incorporates emotions recollected in tranquility in its exuberant play with historical, geographical, or linguistic parallelisms and that those who, like Helen Vendler, want their Heraclitus neat, so to speak, might be disappointed by the impurity and indirection of Muldoon’s discourse. Nevertheless,  it should be added that in his more recent work there are striking examples of poems occasioned by and expressing experiences of an elemental human nature. The Annals of Chile, for example, contains both the masterly long elegy “Incantata” written for the poet’s former lover Mary Farl Powers and shorter poems celebrating the birth of a daughter; in all these poems, Muldoon certainly succeeds in voicing common human experiences while remaining faithful to his predilection for technical complexity. The most recent collection to date, Hay, also includes technically accomplished poems on everyday themes. “The Mudroom”, one of this reviewer’s personal favorites, is a playful inventory of the sediments of family life which it manages to link to a wide variety of cultural and geographical references, all of them bearing witness to Muldoon’s extensive vocabulary and technical virtuosity. “Sleeve Notes” is a miniature autobiography which, in the manner of “The More a Man Has” and “Madoc”, takes its cues from recordings of rock bands dear to the poet. There is a long sequence of rhymed “Hopewell Haiku”, poetic snapshots of the poet, his family, and his cats at home in New Jersey. There are sestinas, a ghazal, a pantoum, and, as mentioned, a sonnet sequence. The mood is often relaxed, with perhaps an occasional hint of wickedness as the poet looks back on his early youth, but there are also––and this bodes well for the future––indications of the professional’s never-tiring preoccupation with the inflaming moment of inspiration, as in the title-poem:

            This much I know. Just as I’m about to make that right turn

                off Province Line Road

                I meet another beat-up Volvo

                carrying a load

                of hay. (More accurately, a bale of lucerne

                on the roof rack,

                a bale of lucerne or fescue or alafalfa.)

                My hands are raw. I’m itching to cut the twine, to unpack

                that hay-accordion, that hay-concertina.

                It must be ten o’clock. There’s still enough light

                (not least from the glow

                of the bales themselves) for a body to ascertain

                that when one bursts, as now, something takes flight

                from those hot-and-heavy box pleats. This much I know.