[In the following review, Howard evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Selected Poems: 1968-1987.]

For the Irish poet Paul Muldoon no value is more central to the poet's vocation than that of personal independence. Speaking to Kevin Barry in 1987, Muldoon expressed his belief that “a writer's job is to be an outsider, to belong to no groups, no tribes, no clubs. So far as any of us can, it's to be a free agent, within the state of oneself, or roaming through the different states of oneself” (The Irish Literary Supplement, Fall 1987). And in the fluid interiors of his poems, Muldoon has remained remarkably independent, sailing with poise and grace through perilous waters. Like his forerunner Louis MacNeice, who resisted the claims of Marxism and Catholicism, Muldoon has been his own best navigator, steering a course through the crosswinds of nationalism, internationalism, Catholicism, deconstructionism, formalism, aestheticism, and the warring ideologies of Northern Ireland. Parabolic, enigmatic, and richly allusive, his poems refract those ideologies but subscribe to none of them. At their most complex they also enlist the conventions of the medieval quest, motifs from Native American culture, imagery from the poet's rural childhood, fragments of the Irish-Gaelic tradition, and parodic references to the works of modern poets, particularly Yeats. The result is an inclusive but subversive art, where the most sacred cow is both welcome and subject to demolition. In contrast to the worlds of Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, and John Montague, where the sense of a center can still be felt, Muldoon's vision is comedic, pluralistic, and deeply iconoclastic. Under the spell of his irreverence, one can exult in the poet's autonomy and the artist's freedom, while also being aware that something has been lost.

[Selected Poems: 1968-1987] is a selection from Muldoon's first five books of poems, all of them written before the poet's fortieth year. A reprint of the 1987 Ecco Press edition, this rigorous selection presents the best of Muldoon's earlier work, most of it in the form of short stanzaic lyrics. Four of the five sections of the book end with longer poems, affording a look at Muldoon as narrative and dramatic poet. One of the longer poems, entitled “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants,” features a hero named Gallogly, an Irish Everyman whose surreal adventures include a joyride in a stolen milk van, the shooting of a corporal in the Ulster Defence Regiment, and an encounter with one Beatrice, whose “grand'mère,” together with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, “sat in the nude / round the petits fours / and repeated Eros is Eros is Eros.” “7, Middagh Street,” the most ambitious and entertaining of the long poems, presents monologues by Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Chester Kallman, Carson McCullers, Salvador Dali, and W. H. Auden, all of whom lived at that Brooklyn address in 1940. In part a send-up of modernist pieties, the poem is also a meditation on the artist's social responsibilities. At one point the voice purporting to be Auden's quotes Yeats's conscience-stricken question, “‘Did that play of mine / send out certain men … the English shot … ?’” To which Auden's abrupt reply is, “‘Certainly not.’”

That answer represents one side in a debate which has been prominent in Muldoon's work from the beginning. An early instance can be found in his fictive encounter with Pancho Villa, who urges a poetry of political engagement:

‘Look, son. Just look around you.
People are getting themselves killed
Left, right and centre
While you do what? Write rondeaux?
There's more to living in this country
Than stars and horses, pigs and trees,
Not that you'd guess it from your poems.
Do you never listen to the news?
You want to get down to something true,
Something a little nearer home.’

“Lunch with Pancho Villa”

In response to this challenge, the narrator destroys his own fiction. It was, he tells us, “All made up as I went along / As things that people live among.” In its deft use of Romantic irony the poem resembles Weldon Kees's sonnet “For My Daughter,” which describes a daughter's decline into moral decay but ends with the erasure of its own creation (“I have no daughter. I desire none”). But if Kees's negation serves to underscore his despair, Muldoon's serves to affirm the power of imagination and the autonomy of the poet, who will, if he chooses, continue to write about pigs and trees.

Muldoon was born in 1951 and grew up amidst the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland. During the Seventies and early Eighties he lived in Belfast, where he worked as a producer for the BBC. Like Seamus Heaney, his tutor at Queen's University, Belfast, he has been expected to bear witness to political upheaval, and his concern with the artist's responsibilities may be understood in that context. More broadly, however, Muldoon's position may be seen as continuous with the Gaelic poetic tradition, where the poet has always played a public role. Whether it be the bardic poet praising his chieftain, or the late-bardic poet lamenting the loss of the Gaelic order, or Yeats declining “to set a statesman right,” the Irish poet has stood at a threshold between the public and private worlds. In Muldoon's poems that intersection is often an occasion for comedy, as in his poem on the Cuban missile crisis. The main speaker is the narrator's father, who scolds his daughter for staying out all night and urges her to make her peace with her Creator:

My eldest sister arrived home that morning
In her white muslin evening dress.
‘Who the hell do you think you are,
Running out to dances in next to nothing?
As though we hadn't enough bother
With the world at war, if not at an end.’
My father was pounding the breakfast-table.

Obediently the sister makes her confession, finding the priest less concerned with the end of the world than with the state of her virginity:

‘Tell me, child. Was this touch immodest?
Did he touch your breast, for example?’
‘He brushed against me, Father. Very gently.’

“Cuba”

Though not vehemently anti-clerical, “Cuba” may be read as a comment on the puritanical and parochial attitudes of Irish Catholicism, especially where sex is concerned. But it would be a mistake to read the poem as autobiographical. “As it occurs in the poems,” Muldoon insists in The Irish Literary Supplement interview, “my family is from the earliest invented, invented brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers.” Literal fact is subordinate to poetic invention. And to read a poem as if it were a vehicle for history, autobiography, or polemics is to violate its primary nature. Muldoon explores this issue further in “The Frog,” a comic parable, which first appeared in his fourth collection (Quoof, 1983):

“THE FROG”

Comes to mind as another small upheaval
amongst the rubble.
His eye matches exactly the bubble
in my spirit-level.
I set aside hammer and chisel
and take him on my trowel.
The entire population of Ireland
springs from a pair left to stand
overnight in a pond
in the gardens of Trinity College,
two bottles of wine left there to chill
after the Act of Union.
There is, surely, in this story
a moral. A moral for our times.
What if I put him to my head
and squeezed it out of him,
like the juice of freshly squeezed limes,
or a lemon sorbet?

With sufficient ingenuity one could squeeze a moral out of Muldoon's allusion to Trinity College (Dublin), a symbol of the Protestant Ascendancy, and to the Act of Union (1800), by which Ireland was assimilated into the United Kingdom. But is this poem not a warning against all such interpretations? The frog, one notes, may not survive the interpreter's handling.

“The Frog” is remarkable not only for its mischievous glance at national obsessions but for the assurance of its ironic tone and the supple beauty of its lines, particularly its play of slant rhymes and liquid consonants in the opening stanza. Evident from the start, those qualities are most prominent in Meeting the British (1987), Muldoon's fifth collection. In one delightful bagatelle, set in a sushi-bar, Muldoon admires the artistry of an apprentice chef, who creates “a rose's / exquisite petals” from “the tail-end of a carrot.” This spectacle prompts an intricate reflection, as notable for its music as for its multiple allusions:

Is it not the height of arrogance
to propose that God's no more arcane
than the smack of oregano,
orgone,
the inner organs
of beasts and fowls, the mines of Arigna,
the poems of Louis Aragon?—

“Sushi”

With its variations on a single syllable and its effortless balance of line and phrase, this sensuous tour de force is the verbal counterpart of the chef's achievement. And its cosmopolitan flavor, more noticeable in Muldoon's later work, sets it apart from the regionalism of much postwar Irish verse.

For those who would prefer the regional outlook and the elegiac voice, the tragic sense of history and the reverential stance, Muldoon's way of writing may be both disconcerting and disappointing. As Seamus Heaney has remarked, “Paul's changing the rules of the game.” And for those attuned to Irish poetic conventions—the bardic manner and the backward look, the sense of place and the tone of historical grievance—the change may be less than salutary. But for anyone concerned with the rejuvenation of language, the revaluation of historical icons, and the debunking of outworn modes of thought and feeling, the poems of Paul Muldoon will come as a welcome renewal.