Beneath all the linguistic bravura it is still Paul Muldoon’s ability to sing with feeling that deserves the highest praise.
Declan Ryan (TLS)
An enduringly important poet. Luke Kennard (Poetry Review)
Terrifying. Clair Wills (LRB)
One of the world’s finest poets at his best. (Raul Nino, Booklist)
He has Donne’s baroque intellectual conceits, but also Byron’s ebullience in word-play… If you buy one book of poetry this year, make it this one. (Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday)
For all his wit, Muldoon can still be deeply moving. (Tristram Fane Saunders, Daily Telegraph)
Muldoon’s longtime readers will be pleased with this latest addition to his oeuvre. (Publishers Weekly)
If you are interested in and read poetry, there’s no doubting that you know Muldoon is here, and will be, for a long time to come. (Sunday Independent)
I confess I’ve taken Paul Muldoon for granted in recent decades, have read the occasional poem in Ploughshares or The New Yorker, but haven’t sat down to work through an entire collection of his poems. Big mistake. That has now changed with the arrival of Frolic and Detour, which contains poems from 2015 to the present, including a few that I judge to be instant classics of English-language poetry. (David Gullette, Arts Fuse)
Although Muldoon has been US-based for decades, Ireland’s history and landscape loom large over his new collection. The Pulitzer-winner retains his penchant for mischief – “Position Paper” follows Trumpian logic down a nonsensical path – and pop culture, with an elegy for Leonard Cohen and birthday tribute to Bruce Springsteen. (Maria Crawford, Financial TimesBooks of the Year)
I’d rather read Muldoon than almost any poet of my generation, even when he’s merely irritating, merely bemused, and a long way toward turning major gifts into minor disasters or miniature poodles. (William “The Lig” Logan, New Criterion)
He published his first book at the age of twenty-one; Frolic and Detour is his thirteenth collection, with him now two years shy of seventy. One might say he has made the journey from enfant terrible to institution (a limited edition of Enchereisin Naturae, with engravings by Barry Moser, has a four-figure price tag). As an enfant, though, Muldoon was never so much terrible in the Rimbaud or Jim Morrison vein as he was sly and subversive, deploying his astonishing technical gifts to undermine and unsettle rather than to overturn. As an institution, likewise, he remains irreverent and puckish. Like Bob Dylan, he makes a point of never being exactly where we expect him to be while somehow remaining distinctively himself. (Paul Scott Stanfield, Ploughshares)
Like the characters as they “flailed away at wheat sheaves” in “Encheiresen Naturae”, Paul Muldoon seems “torn / between a sense of Duty and the Devil May Care” for much of Frolic and Detour, his thirteenth collection. It’s a fruitful location. There’s no grand departure from recent books; the Muldoon checklist can be ticked off – long poems in which the whole world seems connected, from the sanding belt to the wren; audaciously patterned stanzas; cliché-laundering; baroque lexicography : all are present and as impressively managed as we have come to expect. It’s that “Duty” element that feels like something of a renewal, however, especially because of its proximity to the “Devil May Care”. Muldoon is almost uniquely equipped, on this evidence, to produce what might in other hands be dismissed as a “commission poem”, bringing the full weight of his mischievous poignancy to the task — though there is one misstep in this line. “A Belfast Hymn”, a rollicking paean to the city, feels too ruddily optimistic, failing to shake off its sense of patronage and lacking the sort of ungovernably encyclo- pedic freshness Muldoon brings to his other “occasional” work.
There’s a subtle thread of doubling that runs through the book, from its title down, and one of the high points comes in “Corncrake and Curlew”, a parable of naivety and enlightenment in rhymed quatrains which has a Frostian darkness behind its apparent earthy plainness: “The corncrake marvels at the land being green / although the hay’s been saved. / The curlew knows the land’s so green / because it’s a mass grave”. Throughout, there are subtle, moving nods towards the damage being done to the earth, to the breaches made and liberties taken, as well as a sort of never-such-innocence-again sense of the Irish soldiers who set off for the front just over a century ago, and the rending of their lives that this represented. “July 1, 1916: With the Ulster Division” is a perfect example of Muldoon’s panoptic narration. In it “one old ram … his feet raw / from a bad case of rot” becomes — as much by implication, allusion and sonic patterning as by anything like bald statement — a soldier treading the duckboards. The narrative itself veers around, in time and direction, but the humanizing drip-feed of remembered songs, gestures and a lost love that began in a French café with the evocatively named “Giselle, mon amour” make the perfect blackness of an image of the trenches all the more disconsolate and affecting: “It seems now everywhere I go there’s a trench / that’s precisely as tall and thin / as my own good self / and through which, if I march double quick, / I may yet find my way back”.
Frolic and Detour is steeped in Irish martial memory, studded with familiar and unlikely totems of past conflicts, from Viking halberds to the common walnut. There’s a recurring sense of betrayal, of unfavourable odds, rupture and exploitation – Charles Stewart Parnell is invoked on the threshing floor as “the uncrowned / King of Ireland”, but he is muscled out in the course of the book by a host of other leaders, lost or otherwise, not least El Cid, conflated here with another head of the tribe, Seamus Heaney, and Mangas Coloradas, a Native American who “hadn’t allowed for … a pair of howitzers / bringing up the rear”. The atmosphere is that of an inquest: many of the narrators and bit-part players have been sold a lie, are in above their heads and might echo the disillusioned realizations of “It Wasn’t Meant To Be Like This” (as a poem with more direct contemporary political resonance has it): “When we stared into the abyss // we were meant to be in something akin to a state of bliss”.
A different sort of abyss occasions the finest poems in the book. There are several elegies here, including well-judged ones for Leonard Cohen, C. K. Williams (“Almost ninety years, Charlie. Almost ninety years”) and Richard Wilbur; but two, “At Tuam” and “With Eilmer at Malmesbury”, are heartbreaking. The latter, a study in tact and implication, is for a friend’s son. An upright bass rests on a man’s shoulder in “the awkward embrace / of a father and teenage son”; the boy, in contrast to the Eilmer of the title, a medieval monk who attempted flight, “fell hard / from a rafter / but stopped short / of the floor”. “At Tuam” is addressed to a number of infant Muldoons, the poet’s namesakes whose remains were discovered in a mass grave at a mother-and-baby home in Galway, among the hundreds that had been disposed of there over decades. What begins as a list and a litany ends in a gesture that is pure Muldoon – unguessable, idiosyncratic and, in this case, breathtaking, as one more joins the ranks of the poet’s “foster sisters and foster brothers” “in that unthink–able world where a wasp may recognise another wasp’s face / and an elephant grieve for an elephant down at the watering place”. Beneath all the linguistic bravura it is still Paul Muldoon’s ability to sing with feeling that deserves the highest praise.
In the title poem which closes the book, Muldoon pauses self-consciously to reflect that “it’s rare / for me to deviate / from the task in hand”. This comes in the middle of a meditation on the wren’s reported premeditated tactic of weaving lice-eating spider eggs into its nest, Robert Lowell, The Troggs’ discography, the co-opting of indigenous culture by advertising, the Black & Decker sanding belt for which he’s trying to buy a replacement and at least a dozen other related tangents, linked as intricately as a complex equation, instinctively as an anxiety dream. “The fact that I’ve always run two tape reels slightly out of phase / will only partly explain my engagement with the non sequitur / and the leap of the imagination.” Readers curious as to the remainder of the explanation for this engagement could do worse than start here, with Frolic and Detour, his thirteenth full collection.
Muldoon’s poetry is always an education: elegantly cryptic, formally dazzling and as effortlessly musical as it is scholarly. In the age of search engines this oughtn’t to put anyone off: it really takes a moment’s effort to read up on even the most obscure references. In ‘Encheiresin Naturae’, a sequence of fifteen sonnets, the title refers to the way, in alchemy, the spirit joins the soul to the body, as referenced in Goethe’s Faust (alchemists hoped to somehow recreate this substance) and one of the sequence’s epigraphs is a proviso from Monsanto: “When farmers purchase a patented seed variety they sign an agreement that they will not save and replant seeds produced from the seed they buy from us.” Reappropriated here, it’s a perfect, deeply troubling metaphor, and what marks Muldoon out as a poet is his ability to pay attention to this stuff; most of us don’t really know what to do with it. The poem blends agricultural, religious and military history and the last line of the sestet provides the image and end word for the first line of the next poem and ongoing rhyme scheme. The sonnet ‘10’ concludes “the moon being merely the stamp of God’s wooden leg” and ‘11’ opens “When a forked hazel rod began to shake a leg”, for instance, so that every poem contains the seed of the next. As elsewhere, the insouciance of the collective first person makes the erudition charming, a sort of intellectual deadpan: we did this, we did that, “the posts daubed with the blood of a lamb / to protect us from the Angel of Death”. Muldoon is really at the height of his powers here. “Despite the pact / between us, God’s advances / were mostly unwelcome.”
‘1916: The Eoghan Rua Variations’ is a permutational series of nine near-sonnets, a war song of the Gaelic Irish soldier who took command of the Ulster Confederate Army after the 1641 Rebellion. The poems resolve into an intoxicating pattern in their final quatrains, where the fates of Caesar and Alexander, Tara and Troy are contemplated before turning to “The English? Their days are numbered too”; “The English themselves will shortly be moving along”; “Have you seen the shape Troy’s in? / As for the English, that cup, too, will pass”; “Alexander the Great. Great Caesar. Their assorted corps. / Tara is buried under grass. Even Troy’s defences broke. / In the case of the English, much the same lies in store.” The increasing desperation – “Surely the English will get what’s coming to them?” – of the modulated lines is so melodic, wickedly arch and enjoyable it’s been going around in my head for weeks.
Much as Muldoon’s hallmark joy in form and formal innovation is in evidence here, the imagery is frequently breathtaking. In ‘At Tuam’, which recounts the poet’s ancestors who died in infancy, the tone is movingly compassionate even when at its most acerbic: “At least he would never be forced to thank / the Lord for mercies large or small.” It bevels on a central, haunting analogy: “A teenage nun bows before an unleavened / host held up by a priest like a moon held up by an ash tree”, a couplet I underlined three times.
Muldoon visits personal teleology and literary autobiography with the same lyrical flair. ‘Robert Lowell at Castletown House’ returns to the Petrarchan sonnet sequence to provide a mercilessly accurate portrait of the tortured poet as serial monogamist and/or legitimised philanderer: “As it is, he’s managed at once to disable / the burglar alarm and lock / himself in”; “When one’s weighing wives one must sometimes set a thumb / on the scale.” At least, we might reflect, he’s not enjoying it: “His penalty so harsh / it was handed down in cuneiform / by Ur-Nammu.” I was not familiar with the Sumerian lawmaker known for creating the earliest surviving legal code, but now I am, and my life is richer for it.
There are too many substantial works here to do them justice in a review, but it’s nonetheless worth referencing the sheer emotional and thematic range. There are two ekphrastic poems about writers’ problematic relationships with alcohol: ‘Pablo Picasso: Bottle of Bass and Glass (1914)’ and ‘Georges Braque: Still Life with Bottle of Bass (1914)’. The poems are completely identical, listing canonical writers and their habits across seven stanzas: “When T.S. Eliot drank with Valerie Fletcher / she wasn’t taking shorthand. / Marianne Moore drank through a snake-scaled hose. / Dylan Thomas drank on his stretcher.” It’s a scream.
The book is also capacious enough to contain more occasional pieces like ‘Belfast Hymn’ commissioned by the Grand Central Hotel in Belfast which, in ‘How Doth the Little Crocodile’ style quatrains, draws comparisons between national diet and national identity. As a passionate fan of complex carbohydrates, I can vouch for the Ulster Fry as “a clear insult to the heart”. In contrast to the dough, the long poem is self-consciously light:
Most of the things we love to share are made with cream of tartar though any putting on of airs
is a complete non-starter.
Which would be almost twee if it wasn’t so well done and slyly constitutional: “Since we were granted devolved powers / we’ve all been on a roll.”
All of this you can just hook up to my veins forever, but a couple of poems take a more direct approach. ‘It Wasn’t Meant to Be Like This’ is an inevitable lament for the current political situation in the US where Muldoon has lived since 1987. “The news is now not only gobbledygook / but geared, it seems, to what each wants to hear.” True enough, but fairly run-of-the-mill for a poet you’re accustomed to re-reading five or six times. The poem is strongest in its final lines where there’s some questioning of who the “we” actually are: “we did expect to feel self-satisfied, maybe even smug. / It wasn’t meant to be at all like this / when we stared into the abyss.” This punctures white complacency fairly well even if we’ve come to expect subtler interventions from a poet who told us absolutely everything about walnuts a few poems back. I’d have been tempted to cut it, along with ‘Position Paper’ which makes sport of Trump’s unique facility for mangling even the most shopworn proverbs. But a monastic needn’t evangelise: they draw kindred spirits to them like moths to the light. Muldoon’s poetry is already a vigorous rebuke to the worst excesses of the avaricious, the power- hungry and the stupid in its intelligence, nuance and imaginative largesse: it is, and always has been, an act of love and resistance, eo ipso, so I wonder if these more positional poems don’t go without saying.
That said, maybe nothing goes without saying now, and our blithe assumption that it ever did is exactly what landed us in this mess. ‘Likely to Go Unnoticed’, one of the shortest poems in the book, is a triumph. It opens: “Amid acres of rapeseed, a streak of ragwort / may yet shine / as an off-the-record / remark becomes the party line”. And it’s this rare ability to harness the power of the “two tape reels slightly out of phase” with such purpose, an instinct governed by the wisest heart and mind, not only to notice that which passes most of us by, but to perform a full exegesis, which makes him such an enduringly important poet.
(Luke Kennard, Poetry Review)
It does not take long for Frolic and Detour to arrive in recognizably Muldoonian terrain. The collection’s second poem, “Enchereisin Naturae,” bearing epigraphs from W. B. Yeats and the Monsanto corporation, begins with what might be a memory from Paul Muldoon’s childhood on an Ulster farm: “Not for the first time would we wrest the heavy door / of the barn from its jambs.” Immediately, though, County Armagh morphs into Egypt on the eve of the exodus: “the door had been painted with the red of iron ore, / the posts daubed with the blood of a lamb / to protect us from the Angel of Death.” A beat later, Yeats’s “primary” and “antithetical” gyres make an entrance: “It all had to do with interpenetrating cones.” Ireland (Parnell, Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen), the Book of Exodus (manna, Egypt), Yeatsiana (Coole Park, apple blossoms), and a couple of characters named Tom Trout and Michael Minnow continue to meet in intersecting patterns over the course of what turns out to be a crown of sonnets—moreover, a heroic crown, in which a fifteenth sonnet is formed from the first lines of the preceding fourteen. Enchereisin naturae, an alchemical term of art for how spirit was bound to matter, might be equally relevant to Northern Ireland’s relationship to the United Kingdom, Yeats’s poetics, the miracles with which Moses confronted Pharaoh, and Monsanto’s claim to intellectual property in seeds.
Such tours de force have been Muldoon’s calling card for a long time now. He published his first book at the age of twenty-one; Frolic and Detour is his thirteenth collection, with him now two years shy of seventy. One might say he has made the journey from enfant terrible to institution (a limited edition of Enchereisin Naturae, with engravings by Barry Moser, has a four-figure price tag). As an enfant, though, Muldoon was never so much terrible in the Rimbaud or Jim Morrison vein as he was sly and subversive, deploying his astonishing technical gifts to undermine and unsettle rather than to overturn. As an institution, likewise, he remains irreverent and puckish. Like Bob Dylan, he makes a point of never being exactly where we expect him to be while somehow remaining distinctively himself.
Muldoon’s extraordinary facility with both familiar and rare closed forms and his acrobatically inventive rhyming and off-rhyming have diminished not a whit in his sixties. “With Joseph Brant in Canajoharie” gives us not only “Canajoharie” / “chokecherries,” but also “Tomahawks” / “demagogues.” Similarly Muldoonian is the wit of “Position Paper,” an anthology of detourné proverbs:
In for a penny, in for a pound of cure.
A journey of a thousand miles begins when you hitch
your wagon to a star. Take care
not to count your blessings before they hatch.
Poets as formally dexterous as Muldoon run the risk of being accused of emotional dryness or chilly indifference to the urgent sociopolitical concerns of the hour, and both charges have at times been floated in his direction. Neither applies. He has written affecting poems out of his personal and family history, such as “Incantata” in The Annals of Chile, or “At Tuam” in the new volume. His poems about the Troubles lost none of their power for being formally ingenious. “Wire,” in Hay, evoked the lasting trauma of living with political violence so convincingly that the reader might not immediately notice it was a sestina. “1916: The Eoghan Rua Variations,” in Frolic and Detour, consists of nine sonnets, but sonnets with the sestina in the middle—a 4-6-4 rhyme grouping—each of the nine ending with a different translation of a quatrain attributed to the eighteenth-century Irish language poet Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin. The sonnets steer clear of the elegiac or heroic mode we would expect from a commemoration of the centennial of the Easter Rising—revered historical figures like Patrick Pearse, the Countess Markiewicz, and Michael O’Rahilly (all also poetically celebrated by Yeats) race around Dublin as though in a Marx Brothers movie—yet the recurring-yet-evolving Ó Súilleabháin quatrain achieves a mysterious solemnity, tolling like a bell, reminding us of a national hope it took centuries to bring about: “The air tastes of grit. The world offers no safe berth. / Tsar Alexander. The Kaiser. Their serried ranks. / Tara is debased. You see how deep Troy lies beneath earth. / The very English will sink as those sank.”
Centennial awareness appears also in a group of poems on the First World War, devoted to the Ulster Division, the death of Wilfred Owen, and Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor. A few poems respond to the advent of Donald Trump: “Position Paper,” “A Rooster in Tepoztlán,” and “It Wasn’t Meant to Be Like This,” which laments, “We were meant to stride along the higher ground / rather than slouch towards Bethlehem.” This, incidentally, is not the volume’s first allusion to Yeats’s famous apocalyptic poem. In “Memphis,” the Sphinx that in Yeats was “moving its slow thighs” is, as imagined by Muldoon, more concerned about its knees:
My face was the face on the royal sarcophagus
I’d guarded for many an age, my haunch the lion-haunch
Of the sun-god, Sekhmet.
All I had to go on was the hunch
That if I could but focus
On the task I might eventually will the hinge
Of my knee to move. I’d already consulted the schemata
Of the necropolis so was able to inch
Past the pyramids.
“Memphis” is an oddly reassuring poem—this apocalypse, too, shall pass.
Nothing is more Muldoonian than ending a book with a long poem—every collection since Why Brownlee Left in 1983 has ended so—and it is hard to imagine a more Muldoonian long poem than “Frolic and Detour.” Four sections, each of fifteen quatrains, rhymes like “crème de la crème” and “Bill Graham,” all centered (if a Muldoon poem may be said to have a center) on the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair of fifty years past—the frolic?—with side trips—the detours?—through Peter Pan, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Lowell, to name a few. Some Oulipo-like algorithm seems to keep generating the side trips: a reference to Troglodytes summons up British rockers the Troggs, whose obscenity-laden studio chatter produced the bootleg hit Troggs Tapes in the 1970s, and whose classic “Wild Thing” was covered at the Monterrey Pop Festival by Jimi Hendrix, who at Woodstock covered “The Star-Spangled Banner”—they all show up, and Francis Scott Key as well.
The volume is Muldoonian, too, in including several elegies: C. K. Williams, Richard Wilbur, Leonard Cohen, John Ashbery. The examples of Cohen and Ashbery seem peculiarly apposite as Muldoon wheels into what may be his “late” phase. Like Ashbery in his final collections, or Cohen in his final albums, Muldoon has nothing left to prove, and can take delight simply in doing what he inimitably does. And his delight is ours.
“FROLIC AND DETOUR is an apt title for Paul Muldoon's 13th collection of poetry. It sums up what his poetry is about after all - a titular ars poetica, if you like. Think spontaneously playful; 'ludic' is the word critics like to use about his work. The 'detour' of the title is something of a Muldoon speciality. The apparent and casual digression - sparked very often by the sleight of poetic hand which in Muldoon's case means an encyclopaedic and labyrinthine knowledge of the etymological meanings of words and then some - create wonderful deviations from dominant narratives or, to put it more simply, what you might have expected. A Muldoon poem is constantly side-stepping the reader. If, for Heaney, the word represented a sign-post to the past, Muldoon follows the words down an Alice in Wonderland-like rabbit hole. The erudition of the collection is profound, and will send many readers to Wikipedia sourcing the arcane, and sometimes far-fetched, but ingenious connections Muldoon makes. Often those connections can be moving. Take, for example, the sonnet At Tuam, where 'James Muldoon' 'at the age of four months' died in 1927. A national tragedy is made personal by the family-name, and memorialised in formal reverence.There is a poem to Bruce Springsteen at 70, and an elegy to the late great American poet CK Williams, 'Charlie' to his friends, and another one to Leonard Cohen. World War I, and the Easter Rising become subject matter in Muldoon's rhizomatic imagination whose range has about it the hyper-textual swagger of the digital age. Puns are never far away. Try this one for size in “It Wasn't Meant to Be Like This”, 'spinning plate-let-tops, this trompothrombopoesis'.Donald Trump gets an iambic thump - 'The leopard can't change horses in midstream' - in “Position Paper” which befuddles all sorts of truisms into witty conceits. And Elgar's 'blood-burnished cello' we are told must have 'fallen face-down in barbed wire'.Each poem is wrought with elegant rhyme, and very often half-rhyme. (Does anyone do it better than Muldoon?) Still, he is not afraid to bring the cymbals of full-rhyme to bear, 'The crowd that wants to break / W.C. Fields on a wheel may settle for burning him at the stake. 'Muldoon has been quoted as saying that if the poem has 'no obvious destination' we're in for a ride. And Frolic and Detour is some ride. Muldoon is a 'tell all the truth but tell it slant' kind of poet - as Emily Dickinson would have it. With many imitators, he remains sui generis. If Seamus Heaney's poems catch the heart off-guard and blow it open, Muldoon does something similar, but for the brain, and intellect. As he writes in the opening poem, The Great Horse of the World, Muldoon is keeping a hand on that horse, 'so it knows I'm still here'. If you are interested in and read poetry, there's no doubting that you know Muldoon is here, and will be, for a long time to come.” Sunday Independent (Ireland)