Howdie-Skelp

Like the poetic equivalent of Steven Millhauser’s brilliant short story “The Slap,” Paul Muldoon’s new collection creates a similar magical realist effect, with an amalgamation of down-to-earth narrative, surreal images, and elliptical connections. At times, the poet makes the reader feel as if the poems are marvelous word association games being played for high stakes. Muldoon’s poetry, like old age, is not for sissies. His work is filled with riddles and riddled with puns, a verse both suggestive and erudite and strange and dreamlike in its repetitions. He seems to delight in perplexing his readers in the way his countryman James Joyce did. “Get me or get off the page,” he seems to say.

With Howdie-Skelp, the 70-year-old Muldoon, 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner for Moy Sand and Gravel, shows no sign of slowing down or making things easy for the faint of heart. For a decade the poetry editor at The New Yorker and now a professor at Princeton, he has been described by Roger Rosenblatt as “one of the greatest poets of the past hundred years . . . only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury.” Howdie-Skelp, his 14th collection of poems, offers the kind of slap that great poetry from the likes of William Butler Yeats or Seamus Heaney can produce, the kind of poetry that can make a reader wince with delight.

Born in County Armagh and raised in County Tyrone, Muldoon holds Northern Ireland as the locus of his poetic imagination. But Muldoon has lived in the United States long enough for America to become another focus for his wit, anger, and puzzlement. And those two countries take the force of his satire and love in a language that has the jeweled clarity of Yeats and the playful opaqueness of Joyce, lyrical and earthbound, alternately sliding from Gaelicisms and gobshites to learned allusions and postmodern puzzles. At times, the reader feels himself slipping down a rabbit hole that is similar to territory John Barth might have tunneled in Lost in the Funhouse, burrowing deep into repeated lines and unstated connections that challenge the reader to find a way through the dark.

Following Yeats’s example, Muldoon makes the personal political in many of the poems in this volume. “American Standard,” for instance, hints at the political toilet Americans have found themselves in for half a decade: “A porpoise snored upon the phosphorescent swell./Vis-à-vis Trump, we have only ourselves to blame for giving ourselves over to pablum./A triton rang the final warning bell.” Muldoon has some skewers left for a few other presidents: “Some presidents seem to say ‘hi.’/Some presidents seem to say ‘howdy.’/Some are in bed with a Soviet spy./Some are still in bed with the Saudis./Some of us are still trying to figure out why George W. Bush would bestow/the favor of stowing away on a plane to thirteen bin Ladens./We all know that if you spend time in the stew/your goose will be cooked like a goose in Baden-Badens.”

Some of his poems strike in the prosaic tone of a newspaper article and others with the arcane energy of a guy who is a lot smarter than you’ll ever be. Amid the fast and furious flying puns, the puzzling repetitions, and the baffling connections from one line to another, Muldoon finds a way of holding his reader with the seriousness of his frivolity, with the range of his knowledge and interests—everything from Davy Crockett and Zorro, the Swamp Fox and Jamal Khashoggi to a 23 section sequence of ekphrastic poetry that responds to great paintings from the Renaissance to the 21st century. “Damsons,” a poem consisting of 16 sections, brings the idea of the “skelp,” the slap, into prominence without ever uttering the word skelp. “Damsons” leans toward the villanelle and the litany—with allusions to Raymond Chandler and “clips round the ear” swimming in and out of the stream of the poem like a school of brightly colored fish.

Muldoon’s poetry encompasses a large world: the Troubles, Viking raids, the Ogham alphabet, Ezra Pound, Florence Nightingale, and cancer cells. His verse is a skelp, a clap, a clip on the ear. It surprises, it dramatizes that each act comes with consequences, and it demands acknowledgment. And it brings us into the present tense. The final poem in the volume, “Plaguey Hill,” circles like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Toward the end of the poem, Muldoon writes, “At present all/I can think of is the burial mound/once known as Plaguey Hill/that dominates Friar’s Bush graveyard in Belfast,” tying it to his home in New York City, where people “worked hand over fist/to set up field hospitals” in our own plague year.

Michael Pearson, New York Journal of Books

“Howdie-skelp”: the slap a midwife gives a newborn. Poem-sequences dominate Muldoon’s storm of slaps against piety, prudery, cruelty and greed. “American Standard,” named after a toilet brand, riffs for pages on lines from T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” while churning through contemporary concerns like gerrymandering, immigration, and grotesque politicians and their media platforms. Like Eliot, Muldoon’s after big, apocalyptic vision; unlike Eliot, Muldoon is willing — no, compelled — to clown.

In one long sequence Muldoon dives into the human ook that underlies great paintings. His bawdiness is political. Muldoon’s version of Leonardo’s “Last Supper” pictures the tablecloth as Mary Magdalene’s bedsheet, the crease in it “A gutter filled with candle grease. / The semen stain where Judas spilled his salt.” Like many important poets before him, from John Milton to Tim Rice, Muldoon knows that sinners and villains are more interesting, maybe more human, than self-appointed good guys. Poems, for Muldoon, are occasions to plumb the language for a truth that’s abysmal: as in appalling, and as in deep. It’s clear that underneath the play Muldoon is furious, maybe even terrified, about the state of things.

Daisy Fried, The New York Times Book Review

When considering a poet as protean as Muldoon, analogies fail. He is so many things: an Irish poet and part of the American scene, a consummate literary insider, a professor at Princeton. The title of his new collection is a term for the slap given to a newborn, and a cry is heard in ‘23 Banned Poems,’ a sequence bound to offend. It reads like the work of an upstart outsider out to make a career; and he is as angrng straight from and riffing on headlines in the time of COVID-19. Here, too, are sonnets, lyrics, and elegies as good as any he’s written. In ‘Damsons’ he recalls the period when Ireland’s Unionists ‘had introduced internment without trial. / What they held dear / was the idea / there would be no consequences.’ Muldoon’s poetry remains unremittingly consequential.

Michael Autrey, Booklist

Very few poets, living or otherwise, can combine high-speed wit, tongue-twisting alliteration and dizzying rhyme with the kind of insight that makes us pause, laugh, remember; feel envious, out of breath, punch-drunk. In Howdie-Skelp, Paul Muldoon summons the ghosts of TS Eliot and Dante to tell stories about our splintered realities, where the wasteland is everywhere and nowhere and Virgil is an immigrant waiter offering overpriced steak tartare. With cheeky poignancy and almost biblical satirical force, Muldoon captures the arrhythmia of our times, touching on voter suppression in the US, the killers of Jamal Khashoggi, the hopelessness of the two-party political system, and arguments about a united Ireland. With their elongated lines and expansive forms, often cast in sequences or variations, the poems feed on memories triggered by the news, TV binge-watching, ruins, damsons, or Robert Frost’s apples. They also flirt outrageously with paintings, translating the perverse and macabre into luminous commentaries on our desires and taboos. The book ends with 15 mutating sonnets about the rich absurdity of our pandemic lives and a new state of existential confusion.

Kit Fan, The Guardian