Customer Reviews

Horse Latitudes: Poems

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I felt that this book exceeds Moy Sand and Grave in quality. It evokes some of the mystery of Muldoon's previous work. Many of his poems are densely inscrutable, yet somehow utterly compelling. One often gets the impression that he may be obliquely referencing things beyond what is immediately offered in the writing. ...but I am not much of a scholar: is there a skeleton key?

Muldoon reads like Finnegans Wake: multilingual interlocking wordplay, principally puns, allusions and ironic twists on common expressions. The novel's conceit is philology, that language packs in itself the psychology and history of human beings, and that fictional characters, Ireland, and world history can be lined up just right by and with purling wordplay to challenge science, social or even physical, in its ability to discover truth. But what if you're post-modern even in the minimal sense that such a theory was an inflationary bubble that blew up in the last century and that puns, allusions and spun idioms can be used to document middle-class life, enhancing it like sugar eggs' elaborate confectionery adds to the eerie realism of the miniatures inside them? Or you might find crossword fun in figuring out obvious answers from clever clues, a bonus in storytelling like the physical beauty of movie stars in real-people roles. If you enjoy the Joycean for any of the reasons above, or in some fuzzy combination, you should try mulling over Muldoon for he's the best living practitioner of that distinctive art.

Oh this is just too awful for words. Utterly tedious subject matter embalmed in hiply snide erudition [lazy obscurity with just enough reference points to thrill the trainspotters] and about as poetic as the drivel one has come to expect from an earnest Creative Writing Seminar student. Why has someone like Muldoon been elevated to his present position in the Pantheon of Contemporary Poets ... It can't be true, but yes it is ... Poetry Editor of the New Yorker. Dear oh dear. It's amateur-hour for post-modernist kiddies who've attended a hundred too many Writers' Festivals. Watch out Charlie Simic and Adam Zagajewski. My beloved New Yorker will be exiling you soon for being readable, using apposite metaphors, and actually having something to write about. Gee, come to think of it, even John Ashbery with his flippantly surrealistic collage might be too disagreeably poetic for the new door nazis. Paul Muldoon is a professional poet in all the worst senses.

(sung to the tune of "I Shall Be Free No. 10")
I was thinkin' about Dylan and Paul Muldoon.
One writes poems; the other writes tunes.
One's an academic of the third degree;
The other's got an honorary Ph.D.
They've both been to Princeton and to Oxford Town;
They think about somethin' and they write it all down.
They both distill the essence in a coupla words
As subtle and compelling as diminished thirds.
I wish them both a shot at immortality;
I think that Warren Zevon would agree with me.