PAUL MULDOON published his first Faber book, in 1973, at the age of 22. New Weather was a remarkable debut, not just in the ironed out freshness of the language but in the ironic clarity of the thought; this, for instance, is true because it's untrue: "In the way that most of the wind/Happens where there are trees, /Most of the world is centred/ About ourselves"; but then try to follow the thinking and the grammar of the next eight lines (ignoring, if you can, the stop after "hold"): "Often where the wind has gathered/The trees together, /One tree will take/Another in her arms and hold. /Their branches that are grinding/Madly together, /It is no real fire. / They are breaking each other." That isn't easy but it is memorable. If poetry is what occurs at the furthest edge of definition, the young Muldoon had started out at the frontier. But, as Bob Dylan says, "the wind hits heavy on the borderline" and for a juggling jongleur to keep his balance in that new territory and climate called for a lot of jiggery pokery and legerdemain. Turning to the last poem in this book, "Incantata", a long elegy for the artist Mary Farl Powers, published in 1994, we read that she "detected in me a tendency to put/ on too much artificiality, both as man and poet,/ which is why you called me `Polyester' or Tolyurethane'".
As with the best of Muldoon's work, it's hard here to tell the crying from the laughing, but "detected" and "tendency" give the impression that locating the polymers in Paul might require the services of some literary PC Plod (a species, it must be said, not in short supply).
Nothing could be further from the truth. Artificiality, artfulness, artifice, etc., are to Muldoon as oxygen is to air. In this he is like the Joyce of Finnegans Wake: ludic, antic and, as time passes, increasingly manic.
This playfulness can get up one's nose: for instance, "Tomorrow is another day,/As your man said on the Mount of Olives" is less Joyce than Malachi Mulligan. But there are more serious drawbacks to acting the maggot with the language First - the problem of allusions: there is far more than "Enough of Colette and Celine, Celine and Paul Celan:/enough of whether Nabokov/taught at Wellesley or Wesleyan". Second, the problem of following the meaning: how far, for instance, does one want to go around the mountain after this: "Oscaraboscarabinary: a twin, entwined, a Tuareg;/a double engined dung bettle; a plain/and simple firing party; an off the back of a lorry drogue?"? And is it really fair to expect the many foreigners there are in the world to be able to look up Dineen on "the difference between geantrai and suantrai"? These are not minor problems, but when they are seen as both symptoms of and cures for a bigger illness they fall into place. This disease is too large for a name, but Muldoon sees it in the window of a butcher's shop in Milltown Malbay: "To the right hung/one ox tail,//to the left one ox tongue./`What's the matter? What's got into you?'/`Absolutely nothing at all'." Muldoon is in the middle of it all, but that's a placeless place, a nihil occupied by what he elsewhere calls "metaphysicattle".
Because it is only by a strangeness that he sees himself or anything else, he makes something connected from the utterly disparate. Great and small rhymes in reality, secret and not so secret cruelties weigh upon his helpless intelligence and he "smiles, and bows to his own absence". His world is both comically unreal and unbearably present: "All made up as I went along/As things that people live among.
Often its consonance is heartless: A mink escaped from a mink farm/in Sough Armagh/is led to the grave of Robert Nairac/by the fur lined hood of his anorak" - that quatrain only exists for its language; its rhyme is its reason. But this too is the movement of his mind: "A summer night in Keenaghan/So dark my light had lingered near its lamp/For fear of it. Nor was I less afraid" - that's more than a neat conceit.
Paul Muldoon is the cleverest poet ever to have come out of this island. And he's more than smart - the Mary Fail Powers elegy, for example, is one of the most deeply felt expressions of the Irish imagination in the latter half of this century. One wonders what the result would he were such, intellectual and emotional abilities to function without the illusion of allusions and the prop of proper names.