Paul Muldoon: Commentary

Commentary
Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars (Bloodaxe 1986): ‘Technically, Muldoon has learned from his Ulster predecessors, as well as from international influences. An heir to alienation as well as roots, he can criticise from both inside and outside the catholic community. Heaney’s richly created early world (a genuinely prelapsarian vision) has a boundless self-confidence which seems no longer possible without running into the barbed-wire of ideology. What is physical in Heaney becomes metaphysically problematic in Muldoon.’ (p.206.).

Edna Longley, ‘When did You Last Your Father?’, in The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994, 150-72, esp. 168ff.; incl. remarks on Muldoon’s challenge to Heaney’s reading of Anglo-Irish history, quoting “The Frogs” [in Quoof: ‘The entire population of Ireland / springs from a pair left to stand / overnight in a pond in the gardens of Trinity College, / two bottles of wine left there to chill / after the Act of Union. // There is, surely, in this story / a moral. A moral for our times], and remarks; ‘This anti-Aesop, anti-Davisite fable plays down 1800 as much as Paulin plays up 1798. It also criticises Heaney’s “Act of Union” as not only portentously futile, but radical chic, a form of dilettante dabbling in violent waters: “What if I put him to my head / and squeezed it out of him, / like the juice of freshly squeezed limes, / or a lemon sorbet?” A related Muldoonian moral queries the status of historical stories themselves. “History” [in Why Brownlee Left Me] embarks on research: “Where and when exactly did we first have sex?’ and obliquely concludes that only imaginative truth can be trusted since a possible location is ‘the room where MacNeice wrote “Snow”, / Or the room where they say he wrote “Snow”.’ MacNeice’s poem emerges as the only sure thing in a world of shaky facts. (‘Exactly’ belongs to aesthetics in “The Frog” too.) Similarly, the poet in “Lunch with Pancho Villa” undermines a whole industry of publication on Northern Ireland when he states: ‘there’s no such book, so far as I know, / As How it Happened Here, / Though there may be. There may.’ (Longley, p.168.) ‘[..] Muldoon’s poetry, then attempts to loosen the grip of the past on both life and literature ... His techniques sabotage all kinds of certainty about how “far” we “know” into the past or future. Hence the subjunctives, conditionals, syntactical ambiguities, refusals of historic tenses. [... /] To defamiliarise is also to defamilialise.’ (p.169.) ‘Muldoon’s poetry is a profound form of psycho-social linguistics which, by investigating structures of language, reveals “the mechanicism of the [197] trap” (a favourite phrase of Auden’s in the early 1930s)’ (ibid., pp.197-98).

Seamus Heaney, ‘Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland’ (Laver Lecture, Grasmere; 1984): ‘Joyce would recognise the verbal opportunism of Muldoon as a form of native kenning, a Northern doubling, a kind of daedal fiddling to keep the home fires burning.’ (p.138; rep. in Elmer Andrews, ed., Contemporary Irish Poetry, 1996, pp.124-44.)

Patrick Barron, interview with Paul Muldoon, in Fortnight Review (Oct. 1994), pp.42-44, remarks include the information that Madoc, tall tale of a poem, enacts what might have happened had Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Southey’s Pantosocratic colony on the Susquehanna become a reality; re-enacts colonial enterprise with brutal clarity recalling adventures of Gallogly in the More a Man Has [&c.] in Quoof (1983) and Gen. Amherst’s gift of smallpox to Indians in infected blankets in title poem of Meeting the British; recounts systematic hunting down of Modocs [viz. Madocs] in 1873; Coleridge meets Senca prophet Handsome Lake, Iroquois warrior Joseph Brant; Lewis and Clark expedition, and Modoc Indians; the book ‘recorded’ from back of the eyes of South, descended from Southey, by ‘retinagraph’; South a prisoner in a nightmare control centre between Dublin and Belfast called Unitel. The interview includes several points of explication of the above work; and ends with a comment on The Annals of Chile, ‘I hope readers of The Annals will be moved by it, both to tears and laughter. I myself think it’s my most engaging book, and my most engaged.’

Ian Duhig, [q.title,] review of The Annals of Chile (1994), in Fortnight (Sept. 1994); Michael Longley calls Muldoon, at Hewitt Summer School, quite simply, one of the finest poets now writing’; called by a Munster poet ‘in danger of becoming the smart-arse of Irish poetry’; notes that Muldoon said of Madoc, ‘if I’d known how much work it was going to be I’d have written a novel’ and his insistence that ‘he is not in the business of setting crossword puzzles’; notes also the pun ‘aistruchán/translation’ and Astrakhan in his translation of Ní Dhomhnaill’s collection; title of Annals refers to invented episode in life of Bernardo O’Higgins [see Haughton infra]; first poem a translation from Ovid and the Leto story; the book is dedicated to his mother by her maiden name, Brigid Regan, in keeping with the undertaking in The Prince of Quotidian (Gallery 1994), 30pp. to atone for ‘excess of love’ with ‘excess of love’; touchstones are Penelope in Joyce and Táin Bó Cuailnge; an old photo-portrait of Muldoon is included in this long review (pp.47-48).

Lawrence Norfolk, review of The Annals of Chile and The Prince of the Quotidian, in Times Literary Supplement (7 Oct. 1994): reflecting on the enormous marshalling of material and the belief that poetry can be fun, but arguing that ‘the fun got out of hand’; recalls an interview between Muldoon and Blake Morrison, in Independent on Sunday, in 1990, where a slightly baffled Blake Morrison is informed by Muldoon that Madoc is ‘retrieved from the retina of a man called South’; allusion is also made to a gloss of “Empedocles” by Edna Longley in the Irish Times [n.d.], here deemed erroneous; quotes the title-lines of Annals, ‘“There is inherent vice//in everything”, as O’Higgins/would proclaim, it was O’Higgins who duly//had the terms “widdershins”/and “deasil” expunged from the annals of Chile’ – whether Ambrosio or Bernardo O’Higgins, resp. the Irish and last governor of Spanish Chile or his bastard son and Chile’s liberator and Director-General, is uncertain; ‘Incantata’, a beautiful and heartfelt elegy for Mary Farl Powers, artist and one-time lover; reviewer speaks of ‘kind of high risk strategy’; of ‘Yarrow’, ‘Beneath its crazed activity and intermittent wackiness, this is a fundamentally calm poem ... this magnificent poem ... a new kind of elegy, an elegy for the unborn and the dead alike’. (pp.32-33.) See also Muldoon’s response to this review in Times Literary Supplement (28 Oct. 1994, p.17) and his further remarks on recent reviews in Times Literary Supplement (27 Nov. 1994, p.7).

Tom Paulin, ‘The Strangeness of the Script: Paulin in conversation with Sarah Fulford’, in Irish Studies Review (Summer 1997), pp.2-4: ‘Surely with Muldoon, what you have is an extraordinary critical and creative intelligence which plays around with established tropes and so you have the liberating spectacle of his imagination changing and deconstructing certain things. In Muldoon’s case, he puts the tradition of Irish nationalism against many things and this is perhaps an example of escaping the nets of language and nationality.’ (p.4)

Nicholas Jenkins, ‘For “Mother” read “Other”’, review of Hay (Faber 1998), in Times Literary Supplement, 29 Jan. 1999: Muldoon has punningly Joycean rivers running all through his works ... The river meanderas even as it folows forwards; and it is clear, looking back over a career that is now a quarter of a century long, how the delighted wanderings of Muldoon’s imaginatino have always been related to an opposing urge for order and directness.’ Further: ‘The last book Muldoon wrote before leaving Ireland was the brilliantly enigmatic Quoof (1983), a volume associated in Hay with the break-up of a domestic relationship - as if the poetry were equating a failure of intimacy with the complicated remoteness of his poetic style.’; draws attention to Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon (Bloodaxe ?1999), in which she points out that the ninety words which prove rhyme-words in “Yarrow” also determine the ninety words used in the same order in “Incantata” in The Annals of Chile, also the ninety endwords in the same order in “The Mud Room” in Hay, also the same in “Thrid Epistle to Timothy”, poem about his father’s childhood, and likewise in “The Bangle (Slight Return)” at the end of the book, so that five long poems not only rhyme internally but also with other poems in other book, while “Incantata” and “bangle” use the ninety rhyme words in reverse order; ‘“The Mud Room” offers an expansive, post-national vision of Irish identity, interweaving the Moy with the Haute-Savoie, the Camino Real with Israel. This new vision is of an identity (and a literature) in active dialogue with, even defined by, its borrowings from other cultures, a place where the “Hoover, the ironing board, the ram’s horn / on which Moses called Aaron” lie against “a pair of my da’s boots so worn / it was hard to judge where the boots came to an end / and the world began”.’ [Further,] ‘To have written a parable about a “mixed marriage” (the title of an earlier poem about Muldoon’s own parents) between a Cathoic Irishman and a Jewish American, and to have reconstructed an Irish poetic quest in terms of Jewish legend, is to have offered a bracingly impure sense of what “Irish” writing is, or might be, in a global age.’ (p.9-10.)

Harry Clifton, ‘Remembering the Redemptive Power of Art’, review of Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998, in Irish Times, Weekend (26 May 2001), starts by instancing the distinction between poetry as poetry and poetry as work and remarks that for an English and Northern-Irish poetry-academy, ‘Muldoon can do no wrong [while in] the South of Ireland the ‘attitude has been distinctly cooler’; speaks of the utter brilliance of his beginnings. Further, “Immram” (1980), for all its wit and cleverness, starts the rot, and on it has gone, through long poem after long poem, to the word-wilderness of “The Bangle (Slight Return)” [quotes]: “For ‘lass’ read ‘less. / Time nor tide wait for a wink / From the aura / Of Ailsa Craig. For ‘Menalaus’ read /‘Menelaus.’ / For ‘dinkum’ read ‘dink.’ / For ‘Wooroonooran’, my darlings, read ‘Wirra Wirra.’ Was there no one in all those years, no editor, no critic, to take him gently aside and call a halt? Or were they all too busy applauding, themselves caught up in the same frenzy that has left so little in its wake? Entertaining some of these later texts may be, in a brittle, emotionally hollowed-out way, but nothing compensates for their loss of faith in reality. / Thankfully, that is not the whole story. Short poems like “Hay”, a touchstone of truth akin to Robert Frost’s “For Once, Then, Something”, have always gone against the grain. And “Incantata”, a late elegy for Mary Farl Powers and an À la recherche du temps perdu of Irish life in the 1980s, redeems the latter half of the volume. / This is poetry as pretext for autobiography, in a different register from the earlier lyrics, but the fidelity to the redemptive power of Art remains, as ever, at the centre.' (For full text, see infra.)

David Wheatley, reviewing Neil Corcoran, Poets of Modern Ireland (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press [1999]), in Times Literary Supplement (25 Feb. 2000), p.23, writes: ‘Paul Muldoon took Auden his word [viz, a poet should be like a valley cheese] and compared contemporary Northern poets to a whole range of this dairy comestible. Michael Longley is a Brie, John Montague a Port Salut and Seamus Heaney a “monumental Emmenthal”.’ Further, ‘With capering wit, Muldoon assigns himself the “Caprice des dieux”.’ Further, ‘If Heaney’s “Widgeon”, dedicated to Muldoon, suggests an element of ventriloquism in the younger poet’s gifts, repays the ambiguous compliment when he reviews Station Island, reproving, Heaney’s confessional ambitions but singling “Widgeon” as a “small masterpiece” . Equally, if Muldoon’s long poem “Madoc” is an allegory of Heaney’s and Muldoon’s academic progress in the United States, and if Muldoon is Coleridge, then Heaney can only be, not Coleridge’s more usual accomplice Wordsworth but the doltish Southey.’

David Wheatley, review of Vera of Las Vegas (Gallery Press 2001), 53pp., in The Irish Times (21 July 2001), Weekend p.14; libretto; Vera Loman is a lap-dancer; Taco Bell is an IRA man on the run; also casted are Dumdum, another IRA man, Doll, the Immigation Officer, and Trilby and Trench, M15 men; Dawe notes the recurrence of the squeezed-lemon motif here and in poems since “The Frog”, in which the motif connotes the difficulty of extracting morality from the subject’; Taco Bell pronounces U2’s “Lemon” to be ‘total crap’; ‘leman’ and ‘Low-man’ collocate with Vera’s surname; Wheatley calls it ‘a delightful vintage’ and adds an artful apology fo his former confusion of of MacNeice’s play The Dark Tower with Black Tower (another wine) in a former review of Muldoon’s Bandanna.

Gerald Dawe, reviewing of Paul Muldoon, To Ireland, I, in The Irish Times (4 March 2000), writes ‘Irish studies can be a desperately po-faced, especially the obsessive versions which pick up on our Troubled history. It’s almost as if other country in contemporary Europe had a colonial past to think about, one way or the other. Gobbling up the literature in the process, Irish Studies become big cultural business. It is refreshing to read this tricksy collection of four lectures delivered by the current Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Paul Muldoon, because he is way offside, bouncing around with every kind of hunch, suggestion, allusion, illusion, might-have-been, might-be, entertaining some relation or guess, conjuring up whatever association or downright dodgy posibilility that is imaginable. When all fruits fail, try the subliminal.’ Quotes examples: ‘While the word beich means ‘bees’ in this context, it is cognate with a number ‘sharp-ended or pointed things, includp boc, a ‘he-goat’ and bac, a word Dinneen in his great dictionary, published in 1927, gives as meaning, in modern Irish, ‘a quirk, an angular space, hollow or a river turn; a crozier; a mattock; a bill-hook, a prop, a pin; a crook; a peg; a thole-pin; a joint; a hook; a shackle, a hindrance, a stop; a fire-prop; corner of hob; act of supporting, holding back, hindering’. The word becc means ‘little, small, tiny or few’. In other words, becc is a version of the ‘diminuitive beaked thing’ of Beckett’s own name’. After further examples, Dawe writes: ‘[T]he point, if there actually is one, which accumulates throughout the four chapters, is powerful: that Irish writing finds a fulcrum in Gaelic, not as a shadow but as the very spring of the living literature. Gaelic also prevails upon the inherited, or disinherited, sense of what being an Irish writer means. In this regard Muldoon reasserts with self-delighting wisdom the only basis of literature as language - echoes, whispers, possibilities, rhythms and sounds of words and the various homes we make for them in writing and in speech.’ He adds that ‘[t]he wider reaches of To Ireland, I verge towards self-parody and caricature’ and that, ‘with notes doing for argument and only the snatchiest of glimpses at poets it would have been really interesting to know what Muldoon actually thought of, such as Brian Coffey and Thomas MacGreevy.’ (Photo-port. by Frank Miller.)

Robert Macfarlane, ‘High and Dry in the Flood’ [ review of Moy Sand and Gravel], in Times Literary Supplement (11 Oct. 2002), p.24: ‘[...] Muldoon has not shied away in his poetry from squaring up to “darkmatter”. The great elegies which followed the death of his mother (“Yarrow”) and an ex-lover (“Incantata”), both of which appeared in The Annals of Chile (1994), marked him out as an elegist of the first rank, possibly the finest writing in English today. He has also engaged with more public griefs: the Troubles, of course; the genocide of the Native Americans; and now, in the final long poem of his new book, the Holocaust. / Moy Sand and Gravel is Muldoon’s ninth volume of poetry and his first since Hay (1998). In Hay, Muldoon wrote more openly about himself than ever before. He emerged as a married man at home in America: poems described him walking his dog, gardening, or grockling around in his Volvo. Beneath this modest, moderate surface, however. the book also conducted an autopsy of Muldoon to itemise the emotional and physical bric-a-brac, the haberdashery of middle age, which had accumulated in his life and which had come to define him. / Moy Sand and Gravel has left the self-scrutiny of Hay behind, but it has extended that volume’s tendency to openness - to decryption - in other directions. Above all, it is the state and practice of fatherhood which is celebrated here. [...] “Decryption” is a word which catches the prevailing mood of Moy Sand and Gravel, suggesting as it does both a decoding and a concern for the dead. For of all Muldoon’s much-haunted collections, this is the most thronged with ghosts: of dead babies, dead navvies, dead animals, dead writers, dead film stars, dead relatives and dead queens. Throughout the book we are brought to feel what a voice in the final long poem calls “the urgency of commemoration”. [...] Moy Sand and Gravel is, as a disc-jockey might put it (and Muldoon is clearly a man with a sizeable record collection), a grower. It takes time to implant itself, and to unfurl. These are all poems which enunciate a stubborn refusal to be solved, and almost all work to unsteady the reader in some way - often achieving their unbalancing act through a mixture of jocularity and gravity. Those who think of Paul Muldoon as the benign, pudgy Puck of contemporary poetry, imping around with a mischievous grin on his type-face, miss the vital dimension of ethical seriousness in which his work exists.’ (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index or direct.)

Jean Hanff Koreletiz, ‘Sleeping with the Guitar Player’, in The New York Times (Sunday, 13 March 2005): ‘[...] Six years ago, when my husband, Paul Muldoon, a poet who teaches at Princeton, brought home an electric guitar, carried it down to the basement of our house in New Jersey and plugged it in, I was laughing too hard to absorb the enormity of what was happening. I knew he loved music. Growing up in Ireland during the 1960s, he was present at the birth of British rock, and he knew far more about American blues and its influence on both sides of the Atlantic than I had ever cared to learn. He had leapt into action when the U2 tickets went on sale and had dragged me, over the years, to many, many concerts I despises. (I once fell asleep listing to Bob Dylan at the Beacon Theatre.) / Still, I failed to realise that the very loud sounds coming from beneath the living room floor portended great changes for our family. [...]’ Korelitz gives an account of the various instruments, incl. a Fender Stratocaster, bought by her husband; ‘This was a new and unwelcome side of a man I thought I’d known pretty well, a man who never shopped, who wore a watch with a cracked plastic band, and who drove an old unlovely car [...]; speaks of other same-age enthusiasts; ‘Eventually Paul startewd to play with some of these men; ‘12-year old daughter dubbed the new band Freaks with Guitars [...] They were called Rackett’; recounts that Warren Zevon left a telephone message calling Muldoon ‘the best goddam poet on the planet’; wrote with Zevon “My Ride’s Here”, title-track on Zevon’s penult. album and later recorded live by Bruce Springsteen in posthumous tribute album; Muldoon forms publishing company to register his lyrics and becomes a mamber of Ascap; played in Greenwich Village; ‘it occurs to me that much of his success in this odd endeavour derives from the fact that he just didn’t know [...] that his dearth of musicality, advanced age and lack of Rock Star lips meant that it was flatly impossible for him to become the thing he had decided he wanted to become [...] Men have no midlife marker to break before [like ‘menopause’], or even to steer around, in the hinterland from their youth to their age; there is only a great elastic middle [...] On stage he looks like a middle-aged Irish poet, bespectacled, dressed in the same rumpled suit he teaches in [...] Why should I be surprised? [...] one fo the great pleasures of being shocked by some amazing things a loved one does is being aftershocked by something in ourselves [...]’.

Stephen Burt, ‘Connection charge’, review of The End of the Poem, and orse Latitudes, in Times Literary Supplement (24 Nov. 2006), pp.6-8.‘[...] An ally of questions, Muldoon is no friend to answers, and his emnity bears ethical and political points. Writing on Marina Tsvetayeva’s “Poem of the End”, Muldoon advances what has been a theme in his own verse for decades: the ineradicable opposition between any language we might call poetry, and any attempt, as of a political, religious or philosophical faction, to pin that language down. The end of the poem (in the sense of its extinction) is “the beginning of propaganda”, such as the Bolshevik ideology “with which ... Tsvetayeva was forced to contend”. Later Muldoon quotes Graves: “membership of any political party or religious sect or literary school deforms the poetic sense”. Muldoon’s earliest poems said, again and again, non serviam (“We answer to no grey South // Nor blue North”), and his heroes are still saying it: celebrating “Bob Dylan at Princeton, November 2000” in a new poem, Muldoon awards him not an honorary, but “an ornery degree”, praising “his absolute refusal to bend the knee”. /Muldoon’s talk on “ Dover Beach “ deserves special note. Arnold’s own first lecture as Professor of Poetry invoked, in phrases which Muldoon quotes, “that impatient irritation of mind which we feel in presence of an immense, moving, confused spectacle which, wile it perpetually excites our curiosity, perpetually baffles our comprehension.’ Arnold thought he had described one station on the way to understanding great art; for Muldoon that station may be the end of the line. Muldoon also quotes Jean Baudrillard: “Might we not transpose language games on to social and historical phenomena: anagrams, acrostics, spoonerisms, rhyme, strophe and catastrophe?” In such games, “meaning is dismembered and scattered to the winds”: to represent history and experience by transparently arbitrary verbal play is to imply that the sufferings historians seek to explain are themselves arbitrary, their patterns without use and without end.' But note further, ‘Horse Latitudes also offers much that is new, or else unseen since Quoof (1983): compared to the rest of Muldoon’s American oeuvre, it is harsh, slightly morbid, and shockingly topical. The opening sequence takes its matter from the bouts with cancer of a friend or ex-girlfriend named Carlotta, its digressions from the life of her emigrant grandfather, and the titles for sonnets from battles beginning with B: Bannockbum, Bunker Hill, Basra. “Carlotta would ... set a spill / to a Gauloise as one might set / a spill to the fuse of a falconet ... The French, meanwhile, were still struggling to prime / their weapons of mass destruction”. A lesser, but revealing, sonnet sequence, “The Old Country”, seems to have fallen together from the grating clichés which many of us store involuntarily in memory [quotes:] “Every wishy-washy water diviner / had stood like a bulwark // against something worth standing against. / The smell of incense left us incensed / at the firing of the fort. // Every heron was a presager / of some disaster after which, we’d wager, / every resort was a last resort.” “Wishy-washy”, “stood like a bulwark”, “last resort”: these are the pre-assembled ideas to which George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” objected, and Muldoon’s concealed point is Orwell’s overt one: glib words get people killed. (George W. Bush, March 2003: “As a last resort, we must be willing to use military force”.) (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or direct.)

Adam Newey, ‘Clinging on for dear life’, review of Maggot, in The Guardian (30 Sept. 2010), Review sect., p.14:‘][...] Muldoon is never shy of making some hefty withdrawals from the myth-kitty, but these transactions are frequently underwritten by some decidedly spivvy turns of phrase. “Geese”, for instance, combines memories of seeing birds being driven to market, their feet dipped in tar and sawdust “to save some wear and tear on the long road”, with the story of Penelope’s dream about her suitors from the Odyssey ; while the following poem, “More Geese”, finds historical continuities between a skein of migrating birds and ancient Rome: “They must still be sacred to some deity, these geese in a holding pattern // ... must ache still as their ancestors ached / for the chance to fend off a night attack by the Gauls.” [...] He performs similar tricks here with several dolphins, a couple of hares, horses, elephants, pigs and porcupines. But the technique is most effective in the book’s many poems about sex and death. Indeed you could say the whole collection is about sex and death. [...] There’s a loose-limbed, gangling quality to these poems, where one idea sparks another seemingly by accident of pun or homophone, or rhyme. It’s no accident, of course, because this is a poet who is always firmly in control of where he’s going. The effect is of listening to an engagingly bantering companion, even as you’re being taken down some rarely trodden cultural tracks. “Moryson’s Fancy”, which recounts a 17th-century tale of Irish children devouring the corpse of their mother, has, Muldoon says, an “iffy inevitability” to it. That’s exactly the right phrase for the experience of reading Maggot � it’s like an intellectual fairground ride, with daring swoops and hairpin turns of thought. But, though you cling on for dear life, the car never actually flies off the tracks. It’s an exhilarating experience.’ (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or direct.)

Fran Brearton, ‘One Thousand Things to Know About Paul Muldoon’, review in The Guardian (6 Feb. 2015): ‘[...] No one can do this kind of involved poetic narrative better than Muldoon. The connections made are apparently serendipitous, and all the more compelling for that. His technical and linguistic brilliance is probably second to none; the poems are the textual equivalent of a high-wire act, with juggling. So expected now, indeed, may be his virtuoso handling of the unexpected, that the moments which genuinely shock can be those slightly jarring lines where the poet chooses to expose himself at ground level, without the tricks of the trade. If arcane language puts some barriers between the self and a truth he doesn’t want to face, at other times the straight-talking, tonally less familiar Muldoon also intrudes - almost involuntarily it seems - on his own complex poetic structures: “We come together again in the hope of staving off // our pangs of grief”; “As for actually learning to grieve / it seems to be a nonstarter”. / In a recent interview, Muldoon observed that “the minute one thinks one knows what one’s doing ... one’s probably making a terrible mistake. That’s ... the most difficult thing to learn.” “Who’s to know what’s knowable?” is a question he posed in an earlier book (Mules, 1977). In a 21st-century context where everything seems instantly “knowable” for everyone, where we are “assailed by information”, what is “worth knowing” or what remains unknowable have become pressing questions. Unsurprisingly, a fugitive Keats - “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” - lurks in the pages of this collection; or, as Muldoon has it in “Recalculating”, “Earth is to all ye know as done is to dusted”. The earth, however, is now also a Google Earth, and “all ye need to know” there at the touch of a touchscreen. An earlier Muldoon’s work might have required an Encyclopedia Britannica to hand, together with the 10-volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary - or, indeed, the Pearson’s Weekly One Thousand Curious Things Worth Knowing (1904), the book presumably consulted by his father on the subject of “how to remove the merry-thought [wishbone] of a fowl” (The Wishbone is, incidentally, the title of one of Muldoon’s collections). These days, it’s tempting to read him with the book in one hand and an iPad in the other. Without the internet, some of Muldoon’s references are probably unintelligible to the reader. Where his first pamphlet, from 1971, was entitled Knowing My Place, this work, tellingly, is of “Things Worth Knowing”. As Muldoon’s career has progressed, the allusive fabric of the poems has become increasingly private and elusive as it has also, paradoxically, become more expansive, moving further away from a “knowable” point of origin. He’s become, in other words, harder to “place”. ’ (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or direct.)

John McAuliffe, review of One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, by Paul Muldoon, in The Irish Times (25 Jan. 2015), Weekend Review: ‘For 40 years Paul Muldoon’s roccoco artfulness has been a standing rebuke to poetry’s more mundane and literal tendencies. Obsessively formalist, Muldoon’s linguistically omnivorous poems have, since The Annals of Chile (1994), used elaborate rhyme schemes to take on difficult material. / Muldoon’s new book continues in the same mode. Anyone interested in new writing will want to read One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, but, as ever, its weirdness cannot be overstated. / The book, like many of its poems and individual lines, often goes the long way around its subjects, then suddenly coheres. Many readers will have the feeling they have seen Muldoon do all this before, at exactly the same time that they get the feeling that no one has ever done anything like this [...] / Unusually, though, the poems don’t always have their eye (or ear) in. When “Cuba (2)” raises its head above the parapet of its immediate context, it is unusually leaden-footed (“In Ireland we need to start now to untangle / the rhetoric of 2016”), while “Watchtower II” cherry-picks facts about green diesel smuggling and trails off: “It must be because steroids / are legal in the North but not the South the Brits like to eavesdrop / on our comings and goings. As for kerosene, / the fact that it’s cheaper in the North is enough to sicken / our happiness. That and the upstarts / who try to horn in on our operation.” / Muldoon’s genius, and maybe this is true of all genius, is sui generis, but the pile-up of his signature effects can make for poems that read like stylistic exercises. The book can seem “over the hill” when it crams together his dramatic rhymes, non-sequitur factoids and fragmentary asides (which work so well in live performance), not to mind the obscure proper nouns and modal verbs (could, might, should and would). [...]’ (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or direct.)

[ top ]

Fiona Sampson, ‘Sombre lines of beauty from a supreme trickster’, review of One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, in The Independent [UK] (26 Jan. 2015): ‘Paul Muldoon’s new collection is a stylish volume. Its elegant layout echoes almost subliminally what we have come to expect from this master of the trickster elements within language. But the cover illustration, a painting of a Border Post in Northern Ireland, tells us that something both sombre and actual is going on. / Indeed it is. The long opening poem, the nine-page “Cuthbert and the Otters”, is a threnody “In memory of Seamus Heaney”, which arrives at its keynote on the second page: “I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead”. The grief is real, and the words it’s expressed in, as ever with Muldoon, are exactly chosen. “Thole” sounds a tolling note as it carries across into English both the sense of endurance, from the Latin tolere, and its second meaning of an oar-pin, with all that suggests of a ship of death. But this lament also brings us a history of Irish culture’s arrival and dispersal, from the saint in his cell to Irish Americans who “still hold a dirge chanter / in the highest esteem.” [...] These other poems seem to be attending to the lament for Heaney, and to the fact of his death. The book places the late laureate within history and contemporary culture. Tutankhamun and grouse shooting, “Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” and Ben Hur, a Massey Ferguson baler and fado: the One Thousand Things ... of the title are lined up to pay their respects. And that of course is where a culture-maker should be located by a funeral address: at the very centre of the c66ulture he helped to shape. / But this is a book by Muldoon, so there’s much more to it than simple listing. Cuthbert and the Otters has 27 seven-line stanzas. Why 27? Because “In the way that 9 and 3 are a perfect match / an Irish war band has 27 members.” Numerology is part of poetry’s trickster magic. But these arent tricks. Trickster figures, saints and shamans, have traditionally helped the passage from one life to the next: the lament is one of poetry’s oldest musics. Here it restores not only Seamus Heaney but Paul Muldoon to the great country of living tradition.’; (Available online; accessed 07.02.2015.)

Carol Rumens, ‘Poem of the Week’, in The Guardian (16 Oct. 2016)

[...] Although all his collections combine lyric and narrative writing, the more visible juxtapositions of the “Selected” sharpen one’s sense that, despite the poet’s formal finesse, linguistic sleight-of-hand and sheer musicality, his reach is novelistic. Perhaps “epic” would be the better word, more appropriate in terms of the historical interrogations and intertextuality, the torrent of anecdote, and, not least, the range of characters and places. This week’s poem might be a microcosm of more abundant fusions of lyric and narrative moments.

Its lyric focus, the “morin khur” of the title, is the two-stringed Mongolian viol, informally known as the “horsehead fiddle”. (The words are sometimes transliterated through their Cyrillic filter as morin khuur or morin xuur). As Mongolia’s national instrument, the morin khur has a complex and fascinating history, laced with legend and speculation. One theory has it beginning life as the ladle that was used for mare’s milk liquor, and boasted a horse’s head carved into the handle. Wearing its national costume, it may represent “peace and happiness” but there are bloodier connotations. The word khuur itself may keep etymological company with bows and arrows: qor, to which it’s possibly related, means “quiver”.

Similarly, before medley came to mean mixture, a musical mixture in particular, it denoted hand-to-hand combat. Muldoon’s poem, without moralising, clarifies what Marian Johnston called “the complex truth of the relation between art and atrocity” in her review of Horse Latitudes. Horses’ bodies have always been ingeniously exploited and Muldoon has approached the theme from many angles: see Johnston’s comments on the long narrative poem, At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999, and her note on the uses of horsehair in the building works that cost many Irish lives. In the context of the Medley, the horses are raw material for musical instrument-making, only to end up as the spoils of war in the fifth movement. At this point, the categorisation and ordering of body parts begins to recall some of the worst historical war crimes. There are many historical levels of resonance: Genghis Khan’s imperial predations, Nazi Germany, Stalin’s acts of repression, sectarian violence in Muldoon’s native Northern Ireland, the invasion of Iraq, and too many current 21st-century scenes of horror and desecration.

See full-text copy - as attached.

[ top ]