Paul Muldoon Books

it is hard to imagine a poet wordier than muldoon, "guest editor," but evidently there are, alphabetically ordered, a platoon of them. importantly though, paul muldoon is surely gifted, or has been in some previous life, some life here shed in evident order to stand naked and distressingly unashamed in the heated gaze of the passle of muldoon-ettes that he ostensibly (it is hard to imagine but is evidently so) has selected as representatives of a year's worth of american poetic effort. Surprise: most of them sound rather like Muldoon. Though it is a Muldoon non compos mentis and otherwise compromised by the blind staggers. Perhaps he was sidelined in recovery somewhere and assigned the rounding up of poets to a sightless underling. With few exceptions the poems aboard this sinking ship specialize in congealed imagery; that is, great slovenly gobbets of verbiage fast frozen at sea in the hope they would "pass." Poems impossible to decipher (by dint of having been composed with clarity farthest from anyone's mind), and unlikely to inspire a reader to try. although i am uncomfortable being so sweepingly condemnatory, i would despise myself the more deeply for scrounging after worth in bedlam...that is, in an atmosphere evidently intolerant of pride while unshrinkingly supportive of an over-riding disdain for communication. My apologies to Mr. Muldoon if it is a case of his name being used without permission.

"Your burglaries leave no thumbprint
Mine, too, are silent
I do my best imagining at night,
And you do yours with the help of shadows.

Like actors rehearsing a play,
The dark ones withdrew
Into remote corners of the room
The rest of us sat in expectation
Of your burning oratory."

~ from Sunlight by Charles Simic

The maturity of the poems in The Best American Poetry 2005 is instantly apparent the moment you read "In View of the Fact" by A.R. Ammons. This is a deeply thoughtful collection of poems best addressed when you are in a contemplative mood. Within the pages there are many surprises, lovely conclusions and especially creative thought patterns. Sexuality and death seem to be themes throughout, but there is also humor and cleverly designed rhymes the wittiest poets must long to master.

"Ants" by Vicki Hudspith is especially comical while Mary Karr's poem about her son is especially heart-warming and leans more towards a serious realization of life's complexity within expectation. Richard Garcia's "Adam and Eve's Dog" lightens a topic most would find quite serious and Edward Field's poem of praise has a beautiful freeing conclusion with metaphorical appeal.

"If I were Japanese I'd write about magnolias
in March, how tonal, each bud long as a pencil,
sheathed in celadon suede, jutting from a cluster
of glossy leaves. I'd end the poem before anything
bloomed, end with rain swelling the buds
and the sheaths bursting, then falling to the grass
like a fairy's castoff slippers, like candy wrappers,
like spent firecrackers."
~ Beth Ann Fennelly, pg. 46

What I am most impressed by in this collection of poems, is the truthfulness and the straightforward invitation into this sincerity. There is a cleverness in the crafting of each idea (I Want to be Your Shoebox) and at times profound lessons can appear through the viewpoint of a poet who sees the world a little more intensely (The Poets March on Washington). Jane Hirshfield's "Burlap Sack" paints an image of bondage and freedom, while Linda Pastan reveals a different type of cultural freedom.

Paul Muldoon's selections also provide a consistent mood and his love for rhyme and complex sentence structures invites you into a world of poems that reveal intricate details of your own life. At times his selections are realistic and edgy with mature considerations and at other times he has selected profound moments to inspire a more heartfelt appreciation for beauty. Both ideas seem to weave together to form a painting of how life is really lived in a realistic setting, as opposed to a more romantic rendering of ideas within a dreamscape of fantasy poems. Now and then, a line in a poem is so highly significant you can read the entire poem and then suddenly awaken upon a stunning moment.

"Wanting the tight buds of my loneliness
to swell and split, not die in wanting.
It was why I rushed through everything,
why I tore away at the perpetual gauze
between me and the stinging world"
~ pg. 133, Chase Twichell

I can also highly recommend the 2006 edition of The Best American Poetry, which is enhanced with pop culture references and a distinctly contemporary mood. As with all the books edited by David Lehman, the "Foreword" is well worth reading. David Lehman's experience in the world of poetry reveals ideas that will be of great interest to anyone interested in poetry culture.

~The Rebecca Review

BAP2005 surely is a high point for the quality of the volume's poetry and the number of internet offerings included.

first class condition and prompt delivery Thank you

Muldoon here follows his overwhelmingly learned Madoc with another circumnavigation of all his forbiddingly clever and sometimes satisfying contours of his (not our) known world. Part one, as with the previous volume, takes in bits of this realm and, oin Brazil, confounds me even as in the tender and lacerating Incantata, moves me with its honesty at a past amour. The Sonogram and Footling and The Birth track his daughter's arrival, while the long poem that comprises most of this volume, Yarrow, takes on the 60s, colonialism, a sheltered Irish childhood, Arthurian figures, drug culture, Romans, the Wild West, and "the loathsome Mike Oldfield" to name a few topics.

Not for the fainthearted, but rewarding in fits and starts and never less than ambitious, although with no annotations or guidance, each reader will never get out of it a fraction of the learning Muldoon's put into it. This criticism, as Incantata avers, is not unknown to the poet, but it does discourage all but the boldest who journey into a phantasmagorical and ever-changing depiction of intelligence at its craftiest and most conniving. Be prepared to stumble a lot, but don't give up yet.

Lordy, it would be ANYBODY'S best. Paul Muldoon's work has always been great but *The Annals of Chile* is a breakthrough. "Cows" and "Twice" are pitch- and picture-perfect and the intricacies and expansiveness of "Yarrow" could keep me occupied and entertained for months, but more than anything else it is the unforgettable "Incantata" that makes this book a treasure. Who knew that poets like this still existed? (Only in Ireland, I suppose -- and by the way, if you like Muldoon make sure to check out conationals like Michael Longley and Ciaran Carson. A good time is guaranteed to be had by all.)

The world premiere of Bandanna at the University of Texas Opera Theatre (Robert DeSimone, Diretor) combined the music of Daron Aric Hagen and words of Paul Muldoon into a two-act opera that reveals the "basic tension between characters who can accept that love is earned or is temporary, and those who demand that love be absolute." The music was wonderful, the scoring/orchestration magnificent. The performance a pleasure. The topic relevent. I hope this text stimulates further performances of the opera.

Oh this is just too awful for words. Utterly tedious subject matter embalmed in hiply snide erudition [lazy obscurity with just enough reference points to thrill the trainspotters] and about as poetic as the drivel one has come to expect from an earnest Creative Writing Seminar student. Why has someone like Muldoon been elevated to his present position in the Pantheon of Contemporary Poets ... It can't be true, but yes it is ... Poetry Editor of the New Yorker. Dear oh dear. It's amateur-hour for post-modernist kiddies who've attended a hundred too many Writers' Festivals. Watch out Charlie Simic and Adam Zagajewski. My beloved New Yorker will be exiling you soon for being readable, using apposite metaphors, and actually having something to write about. Gee, come to think of it, even John Ashbery with his flippantly surrealistic collage might be too disagreeably poetic for the new door nazis. Paul Muldoon is a professional poet in all the worst senses.

(sung to the tune of "I Shall Be Free No. 10")
I was thinkin' about Dylan and Paul Muldoon.
One writes poems; the other writes tunes.
One's an academic of the third degree;
The other's got an honorary Ph.D.
They've both been to Princeton and to Oxford Town;
They think about somethin' and they write it all down.
They both distill the essence in a coupla words
As subtle and compelling as diminished thirds.
I wish them both a shot at immortality;
I think that Warren Zevon would agree with me.

I felt that this book exceeds Moy Sand and Grave in quality. It evokes some of the mystery of Muldoon's previous work. Many of his poems are densely inscrutable, yet somehow utterly compelling. One often gets the impression that he may be obliquely referencing things beyond what is immediately offered in the writing. ...but I am not much of a scholar: is there a skeleton key?

Poetry is an art form that succeeds only if the reader can share with the poet a vision communicated by the poem. How this work won a pulitzer prize escapes me. The only way for an "outsider" the read this book is with an interpreter and a dictionary so the obscure, at least from my point of view, references can be appreciated. As a reader I get no sense of the images the writer wants to conjure and the poems fail to take me anywhere but to the cliff of reason where I am just left without a bridge for crossing. I do not wonder I was able to purchase this book for such a low price.

Here's a Muldoon pastiche:

Basement

Then to spy
in an unused cellar spot

Under a bulb fixture
long since jury-rigged
in deal cast-off

And between oil tank
and salt-scalloped stone wall

--Between a ruck
and a carapace--

A tiny skeleton--mouse.

My instinct:
to trip-tipsy the dark

--As even the Dean
and Cuchulain might--

fantastic.

[My opinion is that Muldoon peaked in 1990 with his tour de force, MADOC--A Mystery, the book-length poem and astounding work of the imagination. MADOC was large, confounding, mysterious, lyrical, and sui generis (really). Yet many readers/reviewers did not appreciate it. Since that work, Muldoon seemingly has tried to obtain such appreciation by offering more manageable fare--featuring topical themes, easy wit, sentiment, form, and rhyme (not to mention all those pretty names of Irish places). He has served up plates of warm apercus. If that is your thing--fine. He is terribly accomplished--his more recent poems, including those of Moy Sand and Gravel, sparkle with polish and panache. But I will take the polar edge of the creative MADOC thankyouverymuch.]

My rating does not mean this is average poetic work, only that by comparison to his last three collections, it less frequently reaches their daunting and rarified heights. It's actually a better place to start reading the "later" Muldoon, in fact. Domesticity has tamed a bit of the bravura evident in the arcane lore dazzling the other collections perhaps too much. Poems here like "Unapproved Road," mixing Taureg with IRA in its 1950s failed "border campaign," wittily contrast in a way that Muldoon warms to more and more as his work confronts his own hyphenating midlife identity into an American as much as an Irish poet. "Guns & Butter," "Whitethorns," "A Brief Course on Decommissioning" address the post-1998 events in the North of Ireland intelligently and without pandering. His children and wife now enter his work to round it out more vividly, and at least some of the shorter poems here continue the clarity sought in "Hay"'s briefer verses.

The reason this collection loses a star is the last poem, as usual in his work a longer one: "At the Sign of the Black Horse." The Irish navvy-Jewish mogul undercurrent never convinces, but seems layered over the parental concerns. Where Muldoon often swerves to avoid obstacles, here he seems to plow ahead, but ends up floundering a bit when taking more time to expand and concentrate his direction would've made for a better poetic quest into a very deserving subject of culture clash.

These poems are filled with obscene language and non-sensical usages of words. I read this for a school report, and was disgusted at Mulddoon's lack of talent.

This is not Muldoon's most accessible book, but it would be a shame to mistake the surface complexity for obscurity, or to assume that nothing worthwhile lurks beneath. In fact the book is deep, beautiful and profound -- and, of course, because it is Muldoon, funny as h-e-double-hockeysticks. "The Soap Pig" is as moving as anything Muldoon has written (at least until "Incantata" in *The Annals of Chile*), and several poems, including "Something Else," "The Mist-Net," and the excellent title poem are showcases for the poet's inimitable wit. As for those who have trouble locating the "point" of Muldoon's work, they should check out the poem called "The Point" in his new collection, *Hay*. Like his other work, it may leave them scratching their heads, but hey, if you've got an itch . . .

If you plan to underline portions of Byron's work or comment in the margins of the text, avoid this edition as any ink "bleeds" through its poor quality paper (pencil works fine).

An odd little book, this is more of a journal in verse than a collection of independent poems. It was published at about the same time that Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Muldoon's THE ANNALS OF CHILE, and the style here is quite similar to that book's long poem "Yarrow." Like "Yarrow," this sequence is highly allusive and makes plenty of inside personal jokes as well; you don't so much hope to understand it as just go along for the ride. What mitigates the opacity somewhat is Muldoon's playful approach to form: the entries often fall into sonnets, and there's always some kind of rhyme scheme to trace. Muldoon's trademark playful pararhyming is very much on display here, as when he criticizes an Irish production for making Chekhov "more Irish / than a rush." Anyone who already enjoys Muldoon should read this, but it certainly shouldn't be the first thing you read by him.

I am bemused and rather disappointed with this book. Muldoon uses intertextual associativeness to generate wonderful poems -- touching, comic, and stylistically breath-taking. Here he uses the same method in a critical rhapsody that links together a galaxy of Irish literary texts and legends, arranged (or disarranged) in alphabetical order. He moves freely and funnily between Gaelic and English, ancient and modern, biographical and textual. The performance is carried off with brio, in a manner that recalls certain experiments in randomness of Roland Barthes. Unfortunately, many of the allusions Muldoon finds are so farfetched as to make one wince as at a bad pun. He circles around Joyce's "The Dead," adding one or two valid observations to what allusion-hunters have already noted, but otherwise sending readers off on a wild goose chase. Unlike Seamus Heaney, who is a great, authoritative, and highly trained literary critic, Muldoon does not project from his distinctive poetic sensibility a capacious literary critical vision. He flogs to death the idea of "conglomewriting" as a distinctively Irish practice, culminating in Finnegans Wake, but he offers little serious reflection on what the literary value of this practice might be. For that one must turn to works like Gerard Genette's Palimpsestes, which offers a careful and thorough examination of the ancient art of intertextual composition. Professorial pedants will find consolation in the thought that poets may need their services after all.