Customer Reviews

The Annals of Chile

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Lordy, it would be ANYBODY'S best. Paul Muldoon's work has always been great but *The Annals of Chile* is a breakthrough. "Cows" and "Twice" are pitch- and picture-perfect and the intricacies and expansiveness of "Yarrow" could keep me occupied and entertained for months, but more than anything else it is the unforgettable "Incantata" that makes this book a treasure. Who knew that poets like this still existed? (Only in Ireland, I suppose -- and by the way, if you like Muldoon make sure to check out conationals like Michael Longley and Ciaran Carson. A good time is guaranteed to be had by all.)

Muldoon here follows his overwhelmingly learned Madoc with another circumnavigation of all his forbiddingly clever and sometimes satisfying contours of his (not our) known world. Part one, as with the previous volume, takes in bits of this realm and, oin Brazil, confounds me even as in the tender and lacerating Incantata, moves me with its honesty at a past amour. The Sonogram and Footling and The Birth track his daughter's arrival, while the long poem that comprises most of this volume, Yarrow, takes on the 60s, colonialism, a sheltered Irish childhood, Arthurian figures, drug culture, Romans, the Wild West, and "the loathsome Mike Oldfield" to name a few topics.

Not for the fainthearted, but rewarding in fits and starts and never less than ambitious, although with no annotations or guidance, each reader will never get out of it a fraction of the learning Muldoon's put into it. This criticism, as Incantata avers, is not unknown to the poet, but it does discourage all but the boldest who journey into a phantasmagorical and ever-changing depiction of intelligence at its craftiest and most conniving. Be prepared to stumble a lot, but don't give up yet.