One can look at Paul Muldoon's short collection The Prince of the Quotidian (twelve of the forty-eight pages in the book are blank; text in the ones not blank rarely occupies more than half of its allotted space) in at least three ways. For the Muldoon aficionado, it will give further evidence of his ample talent, his postmodern responsiveness to a multiplicity of cultural voices and idioms and style. To those who expect poems to speak immediately to them, these lines (in spite of Muldoon's claim elsewhere that the poet must write about what is before him), with their constant allusions to personal friends, contemporary writers, the annual MLA meeting, et cetera, will prove enormously frustrating and insignificant (with the possible exception of a poem such as the one that begins “The Feast of the Epiphany”). To those, finally, who come to Muldoon via Yeats and Heaney looking for variations on established Irish themes, there is the occasional “traditional” (on the surface at least) reference: Muldoon's Canadian nephew is to be “ignited by the quaint / in this new quotidian … // okra- / monious gumbo” but is not to “forget the cries of the bittern and the curlew,” though such pieties are deconstructed also by gently mocking references to “a Christmas poem from Doctor Heaney” and to the Field Day enterprise of “Monsignor Friel” and others (“Why should this band of balladeers and bards / add up to so much less than the sum of its parts / like almost every Irish stew?”). Readers 2 and 3 will be further frustrated by the blurb on the back cover, which explains that “Questions raised by The [sic] Annals of Chile—published concurrently with The Prince of the Quotidian—are resolved in the confidential, clarifying contexts of this journal recounting one month in the poet's life.” Clarifying!

Muldoon's point, of course—if point is not too pointed a term for his undertaking—is that, to refer to a disorienting Phil Collins song of a few years back, “this is the world we live in.” Muldoon has been translated from rural Armagh (via Queen's, Belfast, et cetera) to Princeton (as had Wolfe Tone before him) and is the chronicler of the strange new world of his current abode. At times the contrast between past loyalties and present unreality is powerfully evoked: “I open the freezer. The blood-besmirched / face of Kevin McKearney / implores me from a hospital gurney; / ‘Won't you at least visit my grave in March?’” Here Muldoon echoes (at least for those in reader class 3) Heaney's ongoing meditations on his responsibilities to a murdered cousin, but he does so with much more abruptness and unmediated disturbance. Still, in spite of such arresting and serious occasions, one wonders in general how long this “opera so terminally bouffe” can stay ignited. Meanwhile, if you like the meta-inter-textual thing (with an Irish twist), Muldoon is “your man.” If not, not.