HIS POEMS ARE A JOY TO HEAR, EVEN WHEN THEIR MEANINGS AREN’T CLEAR
In his latest collection, Paul Muldoon continues his longtime trick of marshaling obscure references into fluent, fun and rollicking lyrics.
By Jeff Gordinier, THE NEW YORK TIMES
JOY IN SERVICE ON RUE TAGORE, by Paul Muldoon
A few weeks after my editor assigned me this review, I came close to sending him a panicked email. “I can’t pretend to have any idea what Paul Muldoon is talking about,” I wanted to say. “The book is clogged with so many arcane references that my brain lapses into fog when I open to a random page.”
Muldoon’s work has been part of the global cultural conversation for half a century now, and part of its lasting appeal — for those who soldier on through any initial confusion — can be compared to the pleasure of puzzles. (Or artichokes, in the sense that you have to peel away the tough outer petals in order to arrive at the tender heart.) Many of his signature poems from past decades, such as “Meeting the British” and “The Sightseers” and “Lag” and “Errata,” have served as a showcase for entry-level gaming: Use a little brainpower (and maybe a search engine) and you can suss out the allusions, at which point the full force of a poem might just punch you in the gut. In his best work, time dissolves. The sediment separating sections of human history melts away. The centuries commingle and — to borrow a phrase from the movie “Almost Famous” — it’s all happening.
But over time Muldoon’s riddles have become more riddled, and his laboratory of wordplay more labyrinthine. If there’s a common assumption that poetry is something you read with your smartphone off so that you can get lost in it, Muldoon’s latest verse represents the opposite: Without a phone at hand, you’ll just get lost. Unless you happen to be a person who can identify Milo of Croton, the Sopwith Camel, Foghorn Leghorn, Diego de Vargas, Château Latour, Chang and Eng, Stephen Trask, Daisy Mayhem, Lord Snowdon, Theophrastus, Marc Bolan, Tony Visconti, Burl Ives, Parker Knoll, Laxton’s Superbs, Samuel Pepys and Belfast Lough without surrendering to the guidance of Google. (And if you can, congratulations — you’re the winner of the first annual Christopher Hitchens Memorial Prize for Knowing Everything.)
Those names, and many more, overflow from the pages of Muldoon’s latest collection, “Joy in Service on Rue Tagore.” (I’ll save you from grabbing your phone: Rabindranath Tagore, born in 1861, was a poet, a Nobel Prize winner and a colossal figure in the literary history of India.) Having been young in the 1970s, I had no problem with Foghorn Leghorn (the Looney Tunes cartoon rooster) and Marc Bolan (the glam-rock god who fronted T. Rex) and David Bowie’s record producer Tony Visconti. I figured out that a Laxton’s Superb is a type of apple because it appeared in a poem called “Ducking for Apples.” But in that same poem I stopped in my tracks at this line: “What gazed back at Nietzsche was in fact Abyssinia/now he’d gazed so long into the abyss.” Gazing into the abyss? I know the feeling.
This leads to a question: Do you need to “understand” every beat of Paul Muldoon’s poetry in order to enjoy it? As with the work of John Ashbery, a lack of comprehension doesn’t necessarily impede delight. Using my very scientific “open to a random page” method of reading “Joy in Service on Rue Tagore,” I found myself marveling (as I often have) at Muldoon’s virtuosic gift for rhyme and his uncanny sense of rhythm. He’s got flow. Consider this passage from a poem called “Artichokes and Truffles”:
When Marcus Tullius Cicero was reincarnated
as Marc Bolan, it was as if a Jeep
had indeed dated
a Jaguar. That was a time when my old friend Beep
was Bolan’s publicist and therefore able to reap
the benefits of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle.
The learning curve is spectacularly steep
when you’re living in a stately pile.
Does the meaning drive the flow, or does the flow reveal the meaning? Or is it silly even to ask about meaning? Does a poem like “Artichokes and Truffles” amount to Dr. Seuss for a Mensa convention? (It’s worth pointing out that there are “easier” lyrics in “Joy in Service on Rue Tagore”: “The River Is a Wave” and “By the Time You Read This” have the lovely sway of old Irish songs, and Muldoon’s translation of Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to the Artichoke” — hey, there it is again — unfolds with a loose conversational vigor that calls to mind a bar stool raconteur.) No need to panic, reader. As the Stoics and surfers like to say, go with the flow.
Adjacency to rock ’n’ roll has been part of Muldoon’s image for years; another of his signature poems, “Sleeve Notes,” consists of fragmentary impressions of albums by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello and Warren Zevon. This makes a lot of sense, because in spite of the depth of Muldoon’s erudition and the vastness of his vocabulary, his work is most easily accessed through the way it sounds. Who else would find a way to rhyme Erasmus and chiasmus, as well as destruction and fluxion and ruction and suction, plus Odin and rode in — all in the same stanza?
This new book includes a short poem called “For Language and Brief Nudity.” Provocative title aside, the entire poem consists of the word “parse” repeated over and over to the brink of meaninglessness. Maybe that provides a skeleton key to unlock the pleasures of Muldoon’s recent poems. Stop trying to parse them. Sing them out loud, instead, and don’t worry about staying in tune. As Muldoon himself once wrote in tribute to Leonard Cohen: “People say that he couldn’t sing, but I never know what that means.”
“Following 2021’s Howdie-Skelp, Muldoon is in a playful mode. The book is buttressed by long sonnet sequences, at once enigmatic, wise and vitriolically angry, notably in Near Izium, which focuses on the Ukraine war: his most powerful political poem since Meeting the British. Elsewhere he creates sense and nonsense through his unmatched ear for unexpected rhyme, avoiding whimsy by pinpointing instances of tender clarity amid the levity: “We mourn all those poor souls who’ve drowned / because our own inconstant beacons // have led to their running aground.” ”
Joy in Service on Rue Tagore by Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon has been writing poetry at the crossroads of tradition and invention for more than fifty years. Compared to most of what currently passes poetic muster—so much that is shapeless and unmusical but vaguely stanzaic, though not even always that—reading Muldoon feels downright miraculous. Just one of his pieces is often enough to restore your sense of how a poem might still be read: with certain expectations as to the artful assimilation of not only sound and sense but of rhyme and meter.
Muldoon may look nothing like the elusive, deep-sea goblin shark, but make no mistake: he, too, is a kind of living fossil. His work feels miraculous precisely because so few poets anymore do what he does (and whether they can or they can’t—could it really be a matter of deteriorating faculties rather than willful artlessness?—most of them don’t). And that’s too bad, because reading him is, in part, realizing all the reasons we gave up on poetry; it’s realizing, for example, that our general distaste for the stuff of the past is little more than an impatience with old, hard words and their painful arrangements. Rhyme has never caused a reader trouble. That a poet’s duty to meter once entailed a readiness to break the backs of perfectly straightforward statements—gnarling syntax to clear the way for a march of iambs, say—is a duty Muldoon’s poems tend to disobey. He routinely returns to forms that were in when the western world was ruled by kings but fills them up with words we use, and doesn’t tend to puzzle us about the order of things; he hears rhymes everywhere, yet, far from old-fashioned, he manages a freer line than the next ten free-verse aficionados combined.
His latest collection, Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, is no exception. Like any solid poetry collection for the ages—and that’s the gist of his oeuvre—it’s also of the ages. The poems touch on several subjects—from the war in Ukraine and the stark tableaux of cemeteries to the hard white facts of snow and Winslow Homer—but Muldoon could write about anything. His relationship to poetic form is fundamentally playful. Moving through the book’s thirty-eight poems, it may not always be clear that a given piece is precisely a villanelle (or, less precisely, something like one), but this is beside the point. Now as ever, Muldoon’s poems do their paradoxical best, looking backward as much as they do forward, to straddle two worlds at once—the old not so much made new as made to feel worth returning to, the formal feeling less formal because, read aloud, it actually sounds like something said. Yet the ingredients involved are often disarmingly simple, as when he rhymes “teeth” with “peace” and “hard” with “heart.” In a narrow pile-up of a poem that seeks to reconcile Pablo Neruda to the artichoke—these are the questions poets ask!—Muldoon finds a conceptual rhyme in the former’s obsession with love and the name for the latter’s delectable, edible core:
So the career
of this vegetable
known as the “artichoke,”
a vegetable
armed to the teeth,
ends
in relative peace
after which,
plate by armor-plate,
we strip away
in delectability
and are finally able to bite down hard
on the unseasoned
essence
of its tender heart.
There’s undeniable music in these lines. If there’s a single rule at play in Rue Tagore, it’s that the reader’s ear is to be won over by any means necessary. Yet the most joy to be had—fair to expect given the title—is in the looping, contemplative drive of a poem like “The River Is a Wave,” which, classic Muldoon, a kind of abbreviated eternity, is worth copying out in its entirety:
The river is a wave that never breaks
though it may briefly surge
as it edges its way out of that three-mile-long lake
in which it’s managed to submerge
its ever so slightly diminished sense of hurt.
The river is a wave that never breaks
despite such fitful spurts
of “enthusiasm.” Let’s say, for argument’s sake,
that if it follows in its own wake
to satisfy an imperfectly remembered urge,
the river is a wave that never breaks
but is forever on the verge
of confronting an issue it’s inclined to skirt
since it’s only the sea, with its incomparable ache,
that may categorically assert
the river is a wave that never breaks.
Not all but many—a hair shy of most—of the poems in Joy in Service on Rue Tagore are just as perfectly realized. Many are available online. Try “Whilst the Ox and Ass” over at The Guardian’s website, and if you like it (if you made it this far, there’s a good chance you will), you will want to read this book.
Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California.
“When a poem finishes with a triple rhyme of “mosaic”, “mosque” and “music”, (Coywolves); or leans back, with apparent insouciance, into a dishevelled cliche such as “when the grape crop / pretty much came a cropper” (The Rain), you know you’ve landed in the fantastically arrayed sound garden of a Paul Muldoon poem. Joy In Service on Rue Tagore (Faber, £14.99) is his 15th poetry collection and the voice here, parrying between being playful and deadly in earnest, is probably one of the most recognisable in contemporary poetry. Trademark linguistic “Muldynamics” are applied to subjects of conflict, loss, mortality and historical trauma, as well as to the more familiar tropes of music, food and individual objects observed with the kind of delighted acuity that describes an artichoke as being “armed to the teeth” or “gleaming like a hand grenade” (Pablo Neruda: ‘Ode to the Artichoke’). It’s great fun, marvellously spry (as in the nifty villanelle At the Grave of Chang and Eng), and in no way reluctant to offer notes of lyric beauty alongside moments of outrage (about Putin’s war in Ukraine, for example), and the kind of metaphysical wit that ever delights in sharply-dressed metaphor (”one of its young / ticking like a watch / from a pocket of its waistcoat.”– Opossum). That the poems here often remember other poems adds to their ludic quality: By The Time You Read This seems to glance back at Muldoon’s own Why Brownlee Left, as well as to the convention of poems masquerading as notes to the reader, (of which William Carlos Williams’s This Is Just To Say may be the best-known example). This is a densely allusive book, as one might expect, that makes of its breadth of reference a carousel ride through epochs, touchstone poems and themes, with characteristic colour, brio and aplomb. ”
A Review by James Patterson, RTE
Opening a new book by poet Paul Muldoon is like breaking through the floor of an unopened catacomb.
Nothing can prepare you for the panoply of riches, the mummified pets, the indecipherable runes and labyrinthine passageways contained within. This is why he endures as one of our greats. His poetry—like that of American progenitor John Ashbery—has always been defined by an innovative sense of play, formal dexterity, intellectual heft and political awareness. Yet it somehow coheres, all because of Muldoon's uncanny ability to make the absurd feel heartfelt and the heartfelt absurd.
In the ten years since publishing his collections One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, Frolic and Detour and Howdie Sklep, many of his contemporaries—including Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson and Eavan Boland—have passed away. You’d think, therefore, that the weight of one’s own legacy within such a distinguished canon would start to press, yet Muldoon’s verse feels just as fresh and era-defining as ever.
In Joy in Service on Rue Tagore he wears his status as Ireland’s greatest living poet lightly. It would be tempting to say that the collection marks Muldoon as his politcally engaged for many years, or that he finally feels comfortable enough in his own skin to write what he wants—both of which are true—though it would also be just as true to say that he has always felt comfortable enough to write what he wants; has always been politically engaged in a way which confounds as much as it illumines.
Poems like Near Izium recall the kind of ribald songs that Allied troops used to sing about Adolf Hitler during the Second World War; only this time the target is Vladimir Putin. "Live by white phosphorous, die by white phosphorous," Muldoon writes of the despot’s decision to invade Ukraine in 2022. "Whosoever throws a body in a hole / and leaves one hand / sticking out must high-five it on the witness stand."
Elsewhere, the poet makes use of lilting repetitions and absurd archaisms—‘nosebag’, ‘catafalque’—to emphasise the deliberate concealment of violence behind politesse and manners. In ‘The Belfast Pogrom’ he recounts the campaign of sectarian murder meted out against Catholics in the city during the 1920s, in the form of a run-on adaptation of the villanelle; that is, set within strict bounds which have been bent and adapted to suit the needs of the subject. This produces an unnerving paradox between the very real cruelty of the event itself and the officialese that became so characteristic of British State responses to violence during the Troubles and beyond.
This approach is also used to great effect in The Hula Hoop—which takes the weaponisation of infrastructure in the North as its main subject—and ‘When the Italians’; an astute critique of the 20th Century global transmorgification of fascism into neo-liberalism, told in the form of eight air-tight pantoums:
"When the Italians occupied Libyan soil
they pioneered the dropping of bombs from a plane.
Shortly after the breakup of Standard Oil
Rockerfeller himself had recoiled
from the notion it might have been preordained."
None of this is to say that Muldoon has lost his sense of humour, or that he no longer rhapsodises on subjects closer to home. Far from it. What Snow is For is a beautiful Robert Frost-esque parable about finding beauty in the transience of life.
In the title poem Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, he tells the story of a secret service agent or spy on the cusp of retirement, who finds pleasure in the small details of his work. There is an awareness of age and dwindling dexterity, but also a knowing wink toward the old pro who has become a master of his craft. Which—tempting though it might be to read the poet into this figure—nothing is ever quite so clear-cut in Muldoon’s work. He keeps us guessing, and like the spy, is always one step ahead.
In the end Joy in Service on Rue Tagore is an enthralling, surprising and masterfully controlled piece of work. One which reasserts the boundless joy to be taken in Muldoon’s lexical tomfoolery and masterful illusionism. This might be his best work since Horse Latitudes, but who can tell? Further re-readings might reveal hidden chambers heretofore undiscovered, and we’re so much richer for that.
“In this expansive outing, Muldoon displays a certain ruefulness, despite being in full command of “that much-vaunted consistency of tone” (as one of the poems puts it) readers have come to associate with him. Muldoon draws connections between unlikely sources, which lends his work a rambunctious, metaphysical undertone. But there’s an overtly political edge to many of the entries here, blending periods and layering symbols to tackle contemporary and historical disaster and subtly explore “the appetite for killing without qualm.” “So much else has vanished/ from our lives,” Muldoon writes, hitting a lightly apocalyptic note. Odessa becomes twinned with Ross’s Mill in Muldoon’s native Ulster, and there are warnings for despots, from “a body hanging upside down by a hook/ like a goat hanging in a souk” to a prediction for Putin: “His poker-face and his death-mask/ will be one and the same.” Muldoon continues his propensity for the longer poem in sequence and the chiming, lexical harmonies with which he makes symphonies. Lyrical, forthright, and playfully sophisticated, these are poems with a bounce to their step and a finger on history’s pulse. ”
“[Muldoon] has charged and changed the language and the forms of poetry. Open his latest collection anywhere and find yourself in a vast elsewhere. Words are savored, complicated; the wonders of etymology never cease. . . . From line to line and stanza to stanza, Muldoon surprises and unsettles readers. Time, situation, language—everything is blended, found to be related, or forced into new relations, given the treatment a taffy-twister gives to taffy. It is mesmerizing to watch, to hear, and to contemplate. ”
Carol Rumens: Guardian Poem of the Week:
Whilst the Ox and Ass by Paul Muldoon
Whilst the ox and ass are granted the gift of speech,
having knelt in adoration of a child,
it would represent a breach
of decorum were we to listen in. For all those exiled
from their native lands, all those gagged
whilst the ox and ass are granted the gift of speech,
all those who’ve dragged
their belongings over a border, it’s still a reach
to take in why two lambs might cry out each to each
across the crevasse of a manger.
Whilst the ox and ass are granted the gift of speech
they almost immediately sense danger
and, like us, are almost immediately struck dumb.
“Beseech” is the word. The lamb will beseech
and beseech us never to keep mum
whilst the ox and ass are granted the gift of speech.
Talking animals are older than Christmas, fabled layers-deep in the human psyche. Animals, of course, might have their own fables about talking humans, our usual speech sounding to them like foreign languages to the ancient Greeks. (As Wikipedia explains: “The Greeks used the term barbarian for all non-Greek-speaking people … According to Greek writers, this was because the language they spoke sounded to Greeks like gibberish represented by the sounds “bar .. bar”). Whilst the Ox and Ass, from Paul Muldoon’s recent collection Joy in Service on Rue Tagore is a poem in no doubt of human barbarism.In the non-biblical Nativity variant it draws on, the Ox and Ass, housed in the stable where the Christ child was born, knelt down to him in adoration and were rewarded with human speech. There was, however, a penalty for any human overhearing their words – an additional plot-twist that may derive from a different strand of fairytale. Some commentators on Nativity iconography have interpreted the two animals as symbols of the Gentile and Jewish peoples whose two-state integration should have been promoted by shared acceptance of Christ as Messiah.
“Speech” in the poem is notably a “gift” rather the more usual “power” and its value connects with the “decorum” cited, the ultimately dangerous tact of not “listen[ing] in” to the animal’s conversation. Decorum, originally meaning “that which is seemly”, is the opposite of barbarism. It operates widely in Muldoon’s narrative technique, and in this poem. For instance, the animal symbolism is never explained. It’s obvious, or should be: there are stereotypes of ox-like and ass-like human behaviour which we can all discern, in others and ourselves. Unfair to the animals, of course, but then this isn’t a poem about animals. No names are named, but ox-presidents and ass-politicians may spring to American and British minds, migrant-phobic monsters born of Republican or Reform parties, perhaps, as well as those from the world’s more overt dictatorships
The poem sweeps us along, carrying its refrain (line one) on a smooth syntactical course, in which it becomes, stanza by stanza, lines two, three and four. The pattern is ingenious, and one that Muldoon opts for in a number of poems dotted about the collection. Here, it’s a procedure that pushes the symbols of brutal doltish power further and deeper into the reader’s conscience.
Emigration, you’ll note, is seen both as a formal condition (exile) and as physical emergency, while censorship applies the gag in line five. The ability of the ox and ass to speak and be heard is revealed as gross injustice, opening a “crevasse” before its shocking metaphysical appearance in the third stanza, “the crevasse of the manger” on either side of which insurmountable obstacle the two lambs “cry out”. By contrast, now, the ox and ass “almost immediately sense danger” – they’re not too thick-skinned when their own skin’s at stake. They’re “almost immediately struck dumb” – the animal instinct still fully operable. And so it is with us. The moral compass-needle swings in a fresh direction. It points to the crime of failing to rebuke the criminality of President Ox or Prime Minister Ass.
One of the pleasures in Muldoon’s work is the light touch, the decorum of humour. Here, it’s more of a scathing precision of anger. There’s a moment when we get to catch a flicker of characteristic craft-consciousness, the poem-maker thinking aloud in the last stanza, “the word is beseech”. “Beseech” is a word that sounds like a cry of pain, as the bleat of a lamb often sounds, and Muldoon’s art of repetition makes sure we hear it distressingly loud. This time it’s not the cry of one lamb to the other, it’s a cry to “us” – we humans, who have the gift of speech and outcry. “Beseech” seems, like “whilst”, to express in sound a timeless verbal intensity and a traditional decorum.
Joy in Service on Rue Tagore is a collection with a wonderful stretch compressed in particularly neat containers. There are numerous sonnets. Muldoon’s imagination flies on verbal wings in many directions, carried on the thermals of the relaxed “Irish mode”( to borrow Thomas McDonagh’s term), his English cast, or rather precision-carved, into that rhythm.
By contrast, the opening sequence against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Near Izium, is an extended, sometimes insult-hurling outcry from the Ukrainian perspective, enacting and relishing, at times, the refusal to “keep mum” that’s demanded with such exacting but decorous brevity in Whilst the Ox and Ass. The latter is among the most powerful political poems I’ve read in years, a “reach” of imagination which awards the helpless and innocent a power of entreaty which is also, in its way, “the gift of speech”.