Book review: Poet Muldoon flexes the muscles of his intellect, technique, not of his heart
Paul Muldoon: Balances multiple voices and themes and peppers poems with allusion and wordplay. Picture: Beowulf Sheehan
- Joy in Service on Rue Tagore
- Paul Muldoon
- Faber, €17.99
Paul Muldoon’s latest collection, is as unpredictable as you would expect from Irish poetry’s most prominent shapeshifter.
Narratives constantly double back on themselves, just when you think you have found a poetic voice you can empathise with, the voice changes, only to emerge again in a subsequent poem — as if Muldoon is standing at your shoulder, smirking at your wrong-headed efforts to pin him down.
So, it seems fitting to begin at the end. The book’s final poem, 'The Castle of Perseverance' comes, naturally, in 15 very different parts but part one presents us with the strongest (but not the strangest) passage of poetry in the book:
The passage is worth quoting at length because it’s a reflection of all the best things about this collection.
The reader is led down dark passages with only the faintest of light to guide them before emerging into strange caverns where all manner of things are heaped on one another, sometimes exotic treasures, sometimes the bric-a-brac of everyday life.
Just as one settles in one’s surroundings, the light fades and we’re on the move again.
Starting with the ocean floor in 'The Spurs', we’re taken on a journey across centuries of history — the Italian invasion of Libya in 'When the Italians', violence in Belfast in The Belfast Pogrom: Some Observations — on and on we go with the poet remaining light on his feet, never revealing too much of himself or his politics.
There is a considerable amount of technical and intellectual muscle on show here.
Muldoon has a gift for keeping multiple voices and themes moving simultaneously across multiple poems while adding historical references, switches of language, wordplay, deliberately archaic phrasing and rhyme into the mix.
The poems can, at times, appear overly determined to be clever which some readers will find alienating but it’s a complex highwire act and few do it like Muldoon.
The subtleties of content and form on display in the majority of the collection make the second poem in the book 'Near Izium' all the more difficult to fathom.
It’s an unvarnished, pin-your-colours-to-the-mast, commentary on the war in the Ukraine that glorifies, without irony, the violence that soldiers commit in service of political masters.
We’re told that “we all must heed the call to arms/ and stand absolutely firm” our enemy will “be strung up by his heels” and have “his nose cut off for good measure” and later he issues the simple threat “live by white phosphorous, die by white phosphorus”.
This is Kipling at his most boorish — the world is ours to defend, justice always ours to administer. The pity of war is certainly not felt here.
Happily, there’s more to this collection. 'Anonymous: A Blackbird' is an arresting description of a blackbird that hides a darker side as the bird’s song sends “a shock/wave over Belfast Lough”.
In 'The MRI' we’re offered the killer opening line: “Again and again we’ll put our shoulder/ to the wheel/ on which we’re broken”.
It was Siegfried Sasson who said: “Parting from the narrator and his narrative, we retain only a fading impression; and he, as it were, takes the book away from us and tucks it under his arm.”
This collection is filled with poems that we borrow for a while, to guide us through Muldoon’s phantasmagorical underworld; before he walks away with his book under his arm, leaving us to wonder if we ever really knew him.
One suspects that’s just the way he likes it.
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