When the United States became a superpower after World War II, Americans became less deferential toward English writers, with the consequence that, on the whole, postwar American readers knew little of the poetry being written in the British Isles and Ireland. Auden maintained a hold on the American audience because he lived here, and Dylan Thomas flashed briefly through the country, but apart from those two imports, modern British poets made almost no impression on the United States. We were content to let them (and the poets of the Commonwealth countries and Ireland) work in their separate sphere. This depressing situation was compounded by the gradual but widening divergence between British and American culture, and by the utter failure, in the service of a mistaken nativism, of American public (and even private) schools to keep British poetry, in a systematic way, in the elementary and secondary curriculum. The American presses that still publish poetry have tended predictably to favor American poets over others writing in English.

Several things have happened recently to change this situation. On the English side, there was a rather surprised recognition that modern American poets other than Eliot deserve to be read. On the Irish side, there was the phenomenon of Seamus Heaney, a poet whose work effortlessly made its way everywhere. Sylvia Plath's poetry attracted the attention of English critics; Robert Lowell lived for seven years between England and America, publishing in both countries; English poets such as Donald Davie and Thom Gunn moved to the United States, teaching students both in classes and by example; Heaney taught for many years at Harvard.

Commonwealth authors, too, appealed to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic: Derek Walcott, educated in a British-derived system and writing under the sign of Yeats and Auden, moved to the United States and was powerfully influenced by the poetry of Robert Lowell. International conferences, too, ensured that poets broadened their literary acquaintance. These transatlantic transfusions have affected publishing: Carcanet, Bloodaxe, and Faber have scouted out contemporary American poets and brought them to the English audience, and some enterprising American trade publishers (among them Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the Ecco Press, and Norton) have taken on British and Irish poets.

Understandably, British or Irish poets published in the United States tend to be ones who have already acquired American connections or an American address. Of those under review here, James Lasdun has taught at Bennington and Princeton, and Glyn Maxwell has had a fellowship in creative writing at Boston University; the Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon teaches at Princeton and lives in New York. Like Davie, Heaney, Gunn, Walcott, and other transplanted poets brought up on metrical forms, Lasdun, Maxwell, and Muldoon carry out their experiments in stanza or meter with gaiety and panache. Their spirited ventures in form offer a rebuke not only to the unarduous free verse practiced by many American poets but also to the unmusical willed employment of “form” by poets who have not absorbed it unconsciously. It is not that the three poets at hand are always successful, but that they are at home with form. They resemble someone who grew up in a good cook's kitchen; people who cook from cookbooks are creatures of a different order.

British English, Irish English, American English, and Commonwealth English sometimes seem like four separate dialects (with subdivisions such as Scottish English, Caribbean English, and so on). Whether we can all learn to enjoy one another's idiom is still an open question (Trainspotting, after all, had a sequence with subtitles). And it is not merely idiom that is the problem. To understand a topical writer like Paul Muldoon we should have some sense of his family and childhood in County Tyrone and the Irish political and ethnic conflicts that figure in his work. To what extent can a poet who, unlike a novelist, has no space for the leisurely introduction of a reader into an unfamiliar setting, bring readers of another country to care about social issues or about ethnic oppression those readers haven't themselves encountered? What was possible for Yeats is not always possible for his successors. …

Paul Muldoon's Selected Poems, taken together with his recent book The Annals of Chile, will give an American reader moments of both admiration and exasperation—admiration for the originality Muldoon has aimed at from the beginning, exasperation at the many private references (especially for a non-Irish audience) in his work. His work has been the subject of debate between critics who praise his brio and those who find him sterile. When I first read Muldoon, I thought—to put it bluntly—that his lyrics were impressively constructed but too often had a hole in the middle where the feeling should be. My former student Steven Burt (who now often reviews poetry himself) argued the point persistently with me, insisting that one could deduce the unstated feeling in a Muldoon poem from the contours of his language, much as one can deduce the shape of a bronze from the mould used to cast it.

Just when I was trying to use Burt's lost-wax theory, Muldoon published The Annals of Chile. In it there appeared, surprisingly, the emotionally explicit “Incantata,” a long elegy for Muldoon's former lover, the artist Mary Farl Powers (daughter of the American novelist J. F. Powers), who, like Muldoon's mother, died young of cancer. In this poem, by contrast to earlier ones in which Muldoon's means of expression seemed to obscure feeling, the feeling appears to exceed the means. This is certainly a better kind of imbalance for an elegy than the other way round, but still an imbalance. The poem can sometimes skirt sentimentality:

I saw you again tonight, in your jump-suit, thin as a rake,
your hand moving in such a deliberate arc
as you ground a lithographic stone
that your hand and the stone blurred to one
and your face blurred into the face of your mother, Betty Wahl,
who took your failing, ink-stained hand
in her failing, ink-stained hand
and together you ground down that stone by sheer force of will.

Muldoon's small subsequent volume, The Prince of the Quotidian, revealed a different imbalance—an adolescent resentment unexpected in an adult poet—generating some rather unlovely bite-the-hand-that-fed-you poems aimed at two of Muldoon's earlier poet-sponsors. And finally (to come to the end of this list), there is imbalance in Muldoon's tendency to go on too long in his long poems (whereas the short ones are often miracles of elliptical concision).

A new book on Muldoon [entitled Paul Muldoon] by Tim Kendall (editor of the Oxford-based magazine Thumbscrew and a Research Fellow at the University of Newcastle) will at last permit American readers to understand the poet's basic references: these include stories from Irish history and legend; contemporary Irish literature and politics; the adventure books Muldoon devoured as a boy; the philosophers he read at Queen's University; the writers (Swift, Byron, Auden, and MacNeice) whom he most admires; fantasies of the Southern hemisphere (Brazil, Peru) and of drug-running; parallels between the English colonization of Native Americans and the Irish; noir detective novels; talking horses borrowed from Gulliver's Travels; stray clichés about mothers in Irish; and so on. Kendall's is just the book that's needed for people sensing something in Muldoon that they want to get at, but feeling at a loss before his Joycean game of baffle-the-reader.

Muldoon is a comic writer with considerable savagery of mind, making always for the brutal detail. He mocks solemnity, idealism, and the centered self—not least as he has encountered them in Seamus Heaney (his tutor at Queen's University) and other predecessors. He sets himself extremely ingenious formal tasks. Kendall points out, for example, the fantastic principles of rhyming and structure in “Yarrow,” Muldoon's 150-page autobiographical elegy for his mother: “The second half of the poem,” Kendall says in conclusion, “is a mirror image of the first half. Effectively, ‘Yarrow’ consists of a series of concentric circles.” These formal strategies are almost private cryptograms: nobody reading “Yarrow” (except perhaps another Muldoon) would perceive, without a lot of counting and back-looping, its obsessive schemes. What identifies Muldoon as himself, however, is his peculiar way with line-length and rhymes.

These devices give Muldoon's best autobiographical lyrics an odd, memorable, off-kilter air, as with his sonnet “Glanders.” Muldoon was already, as a child, hoarding new words, and he recalls in the poem how he first heard the word “glanders” (a bacterial disease of horses) from the local “bonesetter,” or healer, a veteran of the First World War named Larry Toal. Muldoon's unlikely sonnet is, one could say, a Heaney poem told aslant: Heaney would have found pathos in Larry Toal's war reminiscences or a balm in his homemade healing, perhaps. But Muldoon, a cooler poet altogether, skews his reminiscence to emphasize the observant child's ear for language. The child notes not only the new word “glanders” but also Larry Toal's slang (“came within that” for “almost learned”; “went west” for “died”). In spite of the intimacy of the event he records, Muldoon distances himself from his own childhood by looking at Larry Toal with an anthropologist's eye, describing him as the tribe's “local shaman”:

When you happened to sprain your wrist or ankle
you made your way to the local shaman,
if “shaman” is the word for Larry Toal,
who was so at ease with himself, so tranquil,
a cloud of smoke would graze on his thatch
like the cow in the cautionary tale,
while a tether of smoke curled down his chimney
and the end of the tether was attached
to Larry's ankle or to Larry's wrist.
He would conjure up a poultice of soot and spit
and flannel-talk, how he had a soft spot
for the mud of Flanders,
how he came within that of the cure for glanders
from a Suffolkman who suddenly went west.

Offbeat rhythms (lines from dimeter to pentameter), off-rhymes (“ankle” and “tranquil,” “spit” and “spot”), satiric rhyme (“Flanders”/“glanders”), bizarre mixtures of diction, deliberate repetition (“wrist or ankle”/“ankle or … wrist”) and fairy-tale motifs (the smoke-tether) are all characteristic of Muldoon's earlier style.

The later style, as it appears in “Yarrow,” would need footnotes on every other page. Like Pound, Eliot, and Joyce, Muldoon would like us to have read the books important to him, especially the ones he knew well as a boy. Here is a sample of “Yarrow,” with its “mélange adultère de tout” (to cite an Eliot title fitting Muldoon's style):

The magical toad entrusted to me by Francisco Pizarro
might still be good against this bird that continued to prink
itself, alas,
even as we left Sitanda's
kraal and struck out, God between us and all harm,
for the deep north: that was the year Jack McCall would deal
the dead man's hand to Earp,
the year Captain Good was obliged to shave in inco-oil
and S— got hooked on “curare”;
the year Scragga and Infadoos
joined Quatermain in reciting “The Jackdaw of Rheims”
as we plunged deeper into Kukuanaland.

I haven't the faintest idea what most of these literary allusions allude to, chiefly because I wasn't born a boy in the British Isles, and didn't borrow adventure stories from the public library. Of course it is fun to throw such stuff at The Waste Land as if to say, “Not all of us spent our youth reading Augustine, Dante, and Nerval.” And perhaps Muldoon only wants us to sense the general atmosphere of fantasy derring-do that a young male adolescent lives in. Everywhere in “Yarrow” Muldoon tangles earlier periods of his life with later ones, earlier sections of the poem with subsequent ones. The bird in the quotation above is the one that in Muldoon's childhood perched for weeks on the west spire of Armagh Cathedral; S— is a heroin-addicted girlfriend from a later period. The whole “crazy quilt” of “Yarrow” (Muldoon's own epithet) might be understood as a form of postmodern autobiography that aims to replace with a random mosaic of memory the teleological Christian model of Pilgrim's Progress (which still supplies the plot-line, even if unconsciously so, for most first-person life stories).

The best parts of “Yarrow,” for me, are Muldoon's recollections (with ambivalent feelings) of his mother, who died of uterine cancer when he was in his early twenties. She was a schoolteacher, better educated than his market-gardener father, but doomed by her profession to class inhibitions compounding those of her Catholicism. Against the portrait of his mother Muldoon places the portrait of S— as she gradually degenerates from drugs; and in addition to these two women there recurs the figure of Sylvia Plath, emblem of a nihilism never far from Muldoon's thoughts. One respects Muldoon's daring in making up an autobiography so finicky in its finesse, so coarse in its obscenities, so caught between the circumscribing mother and the violent and jeering S—, all ringed round by adventure-fantasies ranging from the Fenians through Charlemagne down to Wyatt Earp.

Many readers of The Annals of Chile will prefer the lament for Mary Powers to the more difficult and oblique “Yarrow,” but I would rather have Muldoon at his most bitter, provoking, and exciting. He has written the story of his own life several times by now in long poems—“Immram,” “The More a Man Has,” “Yarrow,” and “Incantata”—and will no doubt restage it in coming decades. The only sure thing is that the telling will be done stylishly each time—perhaps not with the rather alienating monomania of form that characterizes “Yarrow,” but with something more emotionally yielding that is still difficult enough to amuse its author.

I will myself go on hoping for more lyrics like Muldoon's best—taut, formally brilliant, and wryly bleak. These qualities are illustrated in “Cows,” in which Muldoon wonders whether the truck that almost ran him down a moment ago but is now peculiarly halted on a back road might be a terrorist plant. Even in anxiety, Muldoon, it seems, can be seduced by language:

This must be the same truck whose tail-lights burn
so dimly, as if caked with dirt,
three or four hundred yards along the boreen
(a diminutive form of the Gaelic bóthar, “a road,”
from bó, “a cow,” and thar
meaning, in this case, something like “athwart,”
“boreen” has entered English “through the air”
despite the protestations of the O.E.D.):
why, though, should one tail-light flash and flare,
then flicker-fade
to an after-image of tourmaline
set in a dark part-jet, part-jasper or -jade?

The etymological excursion turns out to be a veiled political allegory: in words such as “boreen” the language of the conquered people slips through the garrison-lines of the conqueror and, with Celtic wiliness, contaminates Anglo-Saxon. Yet nobody writing a political poem would end it, as Muldoon does, with a series of Paterian lines discriminating the signaling of the suspect tail-light from the colors of the Irish dark. The poem gives one to think: it requires the reader to link the lurking truck via etymological pedantry to the closing aestheticizing lines sliding “from finikin to fine finikin” (Stevens). Its sweep of reference (the Irish “troubles,” Gaelic etymology, the O.E.D., Apocalyptic gems) is not easy for Americans, but not impossible either. At least some of Muldoon's expertly (if perversely) handled lines are bound to make their way in America.

It is encouraging to see some young writers from abroad being published and reviewed in the United States, but this cheerful fact should not blind us to the fact that other gifted English poets (Mark Ford, for instance) have not yet found a publisher here. Nor should we forget that powerful older poets of the British Isles are still almost wholly unknown to Americans—Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) of Scotland and R. S. Thomas of Wales, to name only two. When, if ever, will they be as much a part of our literary culture as Lowell or Bishop?