This week’s poem originally appeared in Paul Muldoon’s 2006 collection Horse Latitudes, and is included in his elegantly pared and sparkling new Selected Poems, 1968-2014, published by Faber last month.

The choice of work in the new volume allows readers an overview which emphasises the cohesiveness of Muldoon’s poetic projects. 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.

Medley for Morin Khur is a cunning weave of fiction (“The sound box is made of a horse’s head”) and definition. Metaphor can bridge the gap, though, and when it tells us that the instrument’s “call is the call of the stallion to the mare” there’s a factual base: the fiddle’s strings were traditionally “male” and “female”, one using stallion hair, the other, that of a mare.

Five triplets, all rhyming abc, are self-contained but sometimes linked by anaphora: they blend effects both faintly percussive and melodic. The sounds lighten in each little stanza, “-ed” and “-in” sounds being followed by the light diminuendo of the “-air” rhymes, the latter like the sustained notes which use the whole length of the bow. Other alliterative and repetitive effects add internal counterpoint. Rime riche reins in the gallop of “which [or that] may no more be gainsaid” in stanzas III and IV, and ceremoniously formalises the outer stanzas through their first-line end-words, the singular “horse’s head” of I becoming the plural “horses’ heads” in V.

Such patterning suggests a cyclical motion within the peace-to-war, art to atrocity, narrative. Overall, though, there’s a progress (or regress) from magical and sexual connotations (jinns and jasmine, the animals’ mating call) to the outcry “of blood kin to kin” and the ruthless cleanup after the slaughter. The process seems inevitable: stanzas III and IV may well warn us that human urges to make art and war are deeply rooted and interlocked. The old word “gainsaid” adds a faintly folkloric touch, appropriate to antiquity and intransigence. However playful some of its strategies, the poem confronts us with the insoluble and reveals the total absence of escape routes from the enmeshed conflict of creativity and destructiveness - other than those questionable escape routes of art.

You can hear the elegiac, viola-like tones of the solo morin khur here, in a virtuoso performance which somehow parallels that of the poet, combining gravitas with animation, classicism with a subtle hint of horses’ neigh and hoof-beat.