Of Plan B, an interim volume that included several of the poems in Maggot, Robert McCrum recently said in the London Observer that “Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet’s task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection.” In his eleventh full-length book, Muldoon reminds us that he is a traditional poet who is steadfastly at odds with tradition. If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn’t your father’s poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W. B. Yeats’s remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are “sex and the dead,” Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It’s no accident that the centerpiece of Maggot is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its subject the urge to memorialize the scenes of fatal automobile accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title sequence but also many of the round songs that characterize Maggot, and has led Angela Leighton, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, to see these new poems as giving readers “a thrilling, wild, fairground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish.”
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“Paul Muldoon is a shape-shifting Proteus to readers who try to pin him down . . . Those who interrogate Muldoon’s poems find themselves changing shapes each time he does.” —Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review
“[Maggot] is filled with haunting images of decay and doom, from hares grazing dangerously on a runway to a geisha’s body found on a Japanese mountain … Muldoon has recently said that he could give up poetry, but this book suggests it isn’t giving up on him.” —Patricia Monaghan, Booklist
“Mr. Muldoon revels in the disorder that wriggles beneath and below even the most rigid order … His new work is a teeming infested book from a teeming, infested mind. It bucks what its author calls “this tiresome trend / towards peace and calm.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“[Maggot] is grim, grave, swashbuckling, and made from the marrow of English: there may be no more adaptable strong style in the language than Muldoon’s.” —Dan Chiasson
“In Maggot … the endlessly inventive Paul Muldoon offers his usual sly puzzle disguised as poems … [Muldoon] treats themes of sex, decay and death with startling, acrobatic wit.” —Carmela Ciuraru, The Los Angeles Times
“Muldoon has been a major figure in English language poetry for decades. Despite being as established an established poet as the establishment will allow, there is the vivacity in this collection of a poet with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove. Maggot is a rare marriage between the frantic radical energy of a rebellious youth and the sophistication of a master of the form.” —Josh Cook, Bookslut
“The most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets, he writes poems like no one else . . . [Maggot’s] ingenious poems inform and explicate one another, sharing lines, imagery, even epigraphs . . . When Maggot, with a little pressure, opens up, what surfaces is a sad, acidic masterwork. It’s about endings: of relationships, of lives. There’s betrayal, sex, and violence (always linked in Muldoon) and the dominant trope of decomposition: cancers, sod farms, wayside shrines, even lepers . . . Maggot is enormously dexterous . . . a fine collection by one of our very finest poets.” —Nick Laird, New York Review of Books
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I admit some of this is a matter of taste. Lord knows Muldoon has enough admirers. For me, quite a few of the poems try way too hard to be cool and with it (which is the Pew Porker's aesthetics), and the effort clearly shows. "The Watercooler," for example, is about office gossip and drama as might be overheard around the, well, watercooler (are coworkers ever this gossipy?), but I only hear the creakings of the poem's construction. "@" (as in pmuldoon@lewdgawker.com) is also quite painful; and "Balls" is embarrassing for everyone involved. But I'm not being fair. Muldoon can certainly rhyme; he can be guileful, funny; and there are bright spots. "The Sod Farm," about a young woman who crashes her car by a sod farm, suffering 3rd degree burns, is sneaky in its economy, and is a successful poem. "Ohrwurm" (German for "earworm," meaning a catchy tune you can't get out of your head.... Read more ›
Up a Latvian creek
with a gaggle of Greek
mythological freaks
in a rampaging Gaul's worthy saga,
you'll find Wilbur and Ed
with the dolphin that sped
past the Penguin of Dread
and the freaks and the geeks going gaga.
It's got death on a quag, it's
got rusk in a bag, it's
got flesh-eating maggots
that feast on our eyes.
Down an Antrim back road
with a frog (not a toad)
in full sap-bilking mode
as he thickens the milk in your bucket,
you'll find Sammy and Chuck;
ever down on their luck,
lacking ducat or buck,
they say, "Morons they are so just f___ it."
It's got spirits that flag, it's
got pork as a gag, it's
got gift-bearing maggots
with stars in their eyes.
On a green, grassy knoll
with a mob of French trolls
as the motorcade rolls
into history that's already written,
you'll find Pliny and Franc;
one confused and one blank,
both with no rope to yank,
they say, "Twice shy upstages once bitten."
It's got porcupine slag, it's
got pus (what a drag!), it's
got cheer-leading maggots
that suck out our I's.
For want of a mayfly
the universe was lost.
Perhaps you teach Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot"; if so, get thee to his poem about it
in this book for many fine poems and his "Lines for the Centenary of the Birth of Samuel Beckett":
even after close reading in the classroom, students commonly don't see "What's it all about,
Didi." Here's Muldoon:
"Only now do we see it's outselves who skim
determinedly through the dim
of evenfall . . . "
