Paul Muldoon was raised in a Catholic household in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland in the townland of Collegelands near the village of Moy. His father, Patrick, was a laborer and a market gardener, and his mother, Brigid (neé Regan), was a schoolteacher. This is the “mixed marriage” that Muldoon discusses in an early poem of the same title. He attended grammar school at St. Patrick’s College in Armagh and there studied Gaelic language, literature, and song. At St. Patrick’s he also studied English literature. He began to write poetry in Irish but soon switched to English because of his better command of the language. Muldoon eventually sent poems to Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, two well-known Irish poets, and Heaney published a few in Thresholds.

Muldoon’s association with Heaney and other prominent Irish poets continued. His tutor at Queen’s University in Belfast, where he studied Celtic language and literature and Scholastic philosophy as well as English literature, was Heaney. Muldoon studied under Heaney and attended weekly poetry gatherings in Heaney’s home. The group included the Ulster poets Mahon and Michael Longley, the critic Michael Allen, and other young poets. It served as a critical forum, and Muldoon asserts it was quite beneficial. Indeed, these gatherings may have laid the foundation for a poet whose work has evolved from finding significance in the simple to being simple yet significant.

Muldoon’s collection New Weather appeared the year he obtained his B.A. and was published under Heaney’s shadow. Many critics, when it was released, contended that Muldoon was simply a younger Heaney. For example, in “Wind and Tree,” what seems a casual observation actually embodies more significance:

     In the way that the most of the wind    Happens where there are trees,    Most of the world is centered    About ourselves.

Noted critic Edna Longley discusses how a moral and psychological condition reflected through the landscape is a mark of Ulster poets, but Muldoon takes this device in a different direction from that typical of Heaney. In comparison to Heaney’s elemental analogies, Muldoon’s metaphors tend to be metaphysical and reflect correspondences that result from observations and occurrences—as in “Good Friday 1971, Driving Westward”—with layered, multiple meanings.

Critic Roger Conover speaks of Muldoon’s poetry as “see[ing] into things.” This introspection continues in the collection Mules (1977), one of the many collections published during his thirteen years (1973-1986) as a radio and television producer of arts programming for BBC Northern Ireland. Mules offers an interesting mix of themes. Muldoon still looks at the everyday in a different light, as in the poem, “Mules,” in which his father and neighbor watch a mare and jackass mate in a field. Immediately Muldoon thinks of the “gaunt, sexless foal” that will be born. His observation suggests the binaries of Irish life: North and South, Protestant and Catholic, British and Irish. Other poems in the collection are autobiographical and do not give themselves over to interpretation. However, there are poems with a clearer commentary on the turmoil of Northern Irish life, such as the opening poem, “Lunch with Pancho Villa.”

In Why Brownlee Left , Muldoon writes in lucid language. Many lines are beautifully crafted and deceivingly simplistic, and the great number of narrative poems make the collection an enjoyable read. Also, Muldoon’s commentary on Irish life is more convincing in this collection because he moves away from inflated rhetoric and bardic posturing. The final poem, “Immram,” is adopted from the medieval tale “Immram Mael Duin.” (The name “Muldoon” is derivative of Mael Duin.) Widely praised by critics, this poem narrates a boy’s search for his father. Various literary influences are...