[In the following positive review, Jones argues that Madoc: A Mystery is “the most ambitious and successful long poem that we've seen in a long time.”]

Paul Muldoon established a name for himself among the poets of Ireland at an early age. New Weather, his first book, was published before his twenty-second birthday. Four books and a Selected Poems later, readers have some idea of what to expect from him. What we have come to expect is surprise and innovation, along with a subtle wit and sharp ear.

We have also come to expect a certain design in each of his books. The usual design is a collection of short poems widely varying in form, mostly under a page in length, followed by a longer, more narrative piece that throws a different light on the short poems that went before. In Mules, the long poem was a series of sonnets called “Armageddon, Armageddon.” In Why Brownlee Left, “Immram” was based on a ten-line stanza. In Quoof, “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants” marked a return to a version of the sonnet sequence. In Meeting the British, “7, Middagh Street” recreated an imagined conversation between W. H. Auden, Salvador Dali, Gypsy Rose Lee, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Louis MacNiece, and others, using further variations on the sonnet. Each long poem is rife with literary and historical allusion and with quite a bit of illusion, fostered by Muldoon's canny ability to find rhyme in places yet unplumbed by other poets and to use rhythm in ways undreamed of by American New Formalists.

Now in his new book, Madoc, Muldoon has turned the formula on its head. Madoc begins with shorter poems—but this time only seven of them—followed by the long title poem(s). The mystery poem itself is made up of a series of short poems or literary fragments, in the best Modernist sense, each headed with the name of a historic thinker enclosed in brackets, from [Thales] to [Hawking].

The story of Madoc is a combination of “what ifs,” the foremost being “What if Robert Southey and Samuel Coleridge actually crossed the Atlantic and attempted to found their Pantisocracy?” Their adventures are complicated not only by various word plays and references to the bracketed names above each stanza, but also by references to Southey's long poem Madoc. In Southey's epic, a Welsh prince, Madog ab Owain Gwynedd establishes a colony along the southern branches of the Missouri sometime in the twelfth century. At the time Southey's book was published (1805), Indians discovered in the same area were found to be speaking a nearly untranslatable language; several linguists proposed that the speech was a variation on Welsh. Literature, history, exploration, and science were, as they have become again, well braided and confounded.

Muldoon's variation is, as his readers might have guessed, entirely original, wide-ranging, and carried forth with the utmost gusto, humor, and intelligence; Muldoon, the young rowdy, the hoodlum poet, is also Paul the serious thinker grappling with the complex issues of the past and present. Besides Coleridge and Southey, Byron, Tom Moore, George Catlin, Lewis and Clark, and the Mandan and Modoc Indians contribute to the mystery, which quickly becomes Joycean in its language play and folding of the narrative.

On the page headed by [Watt]—for James Watt, who invented a revolutionary new kind of steam engine—the reader finds the narrative chugging ahead:

Coincidentally, as she charges his porringer
from a piggin of steamed milk,
Edith skites
his immmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmaculate
pea-green waistcoat;
this is much more than Southey can endure.

The philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper's name heads the page that contains these lines:

We last see him crouching in blood like a jugged hare.
As to where he goes? It's a matter of pure conjecture.

Immediately following, the [Adorno] page displays more great examples of Byron-like hudibrastic rhyming with Muldoon's own slanting touch:

                                                            §
April 19th, 1824. On the shore at Missolonghi
Byron's ball-and-chain is missing a link.
                                                            §
Independence Day, 1826. A gasp on a cello
or viola reverberates through Monticello.
The polygraph at its usual rigmarole.
The gopher pining for a caramel.
                                                            §
Jefferson clutches a bar of lye-soap
on which is scratched the name BEELZEBUB.

Later in the poem is the [Camus] entry, a journal jotting: “June 16th, 1837. The Mandan villages are ravaged by smallpox.” Permutations on the phrase “De dum, de dum” to “De dum, Te Deum” and back again occur in no fewer than thirteen sections including [Theophrastus], [Anselm], [Copernicus], [Kierkegaard], [Marx], [Derrida], and [Hawking].

Hidden in the key to the mystery is the personalization of the work. The Pantisocracy is established between Athens and Ulster in Pennsylvania. Catlin's Indian Gallery visits Ireland, stopping at the site of the framing story in which Southey (a relative of Southey or a stand—in for Southern Ireland?) is captured wandering in the iridescent Dome of the Unitel West located, the narrator tells us, “half-way between Belfast and Dublin.” The briefcase, tea, panther, grouse (capercailles), and especially the key of the short, more personal introductory poems supply a linking to the present and to Muldoon.

Taken out of context, these permutations and references may seem like only slight jokes, but Muldoon manages to address—albeit in a highly non-deterministic manner—questions of religion, language, colonialism, gender, race, violence, nature, and the workings of art. The particular skill and humor brought to bear on these problems never diminishes them, but instead urges the reader, by way of the sheer pleasure involved, to become more involved with the work and the questions.

Even read in context, the poem itself may seem too full of references and too full of itself for some readers, especially those who found “7, Middagh Street” not to their liking. Still, the project is compelling, confident, and not at all half-baked or half-fulfilled. Each piece is an essential part of the larger puzzle, and each piece offers a bit of enchantment taken on its own. Taken as a whole, the work is possibly the most ambitious and successful long poem that we've seen in a long time—James Merrill's excellent work notwithstanding.