Paul Muldoon - Maggot

Paul Muldoon, Maggot (Faber)

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It might seem contradictory that a book ostensibly with a theme of rot and decay pursues it with such celebrated verve and display.

In his new book, Muldoon extends his already outlandish wordplay and inventiveness over 118 pages of poems, many of them 'sequences' (terrible word, I'm sorry. I don't like it either) in which forms are carried through several incarnations in line patterns, stanza forms or, in the title poem, a whole stanza repeated in all nine sections. It's 'form' in just as idiosyncratic a way as the rest of his idiom is.

Often, ready-made colloquial or slang phrases are used alongside the most abstruse or esoteric references as well as elements carried over from the end of one part to the next, insistent associations and apparently endless linguistic effects. It is what his End of the Poem lectures found to an astonishing degree in the poems of others and here, perhaps more than ever before, he demonstrates the workings of an almost infinitely over-active mind in his own work.

While in Incantata, this was very moving and in Hay it was haunting and clever and in Milkweed and Monarch its economy was rewarded with memorable echoes, it is now taken to such lengths and more spelt out that it is becoming overwhelming and surfeits more than it satisfies. I feel as if I'm lagging so far behind that I've lost sight of him and I'm not convinced that it's my lack of fitness that's entirely to blame.

But that is not to say there isn't plenty to enjoy here. As can sometimes be the case, these poems would be better heard than read and Muldoon is one of the great voices among living poets. With his delivery in mind one can hear the rhymes dropping into place and they are much more often brilliant than forced. He would land on them astutely and pin them in your memory.

The poems I like best at first here, and of course it will be a book that others will spend more time on and find much more in, look back on childhood. The Fish Ladder is beautiful in its peculiar way, and a great insight, a sophisticated idea that ends,

Just look at how two ferries

have gone down within plain sight of the pier

but only one tatterdemalion wave

has managed to stumble ashore.

And it has to be admired how, in the three parts of Sandro Botticelli: The Adoration of the Magi, recollections of Christmasses past, the rhymes on the same word are the same word with different meanings. Another form of Muldoon rhyme, perhaps clever for the sake of it, but my hat comes off to it.

He also brings in Baudelaire in a poem that is just about tremendous enough, then Beckett and Byron and, it could be worse than use the @ on the keyboard to muse upon awhile but when he dedicates a poem to John Ashbery, I'm ready for him.

I'm glad of the opportunity to be able to quote Neil Powell in the latest PNR who in turn is quoting P. J. Kavanagh on Ashbery on his 'sleep-inducing' quality, 'I may be wrong about the poetry but I'm not wrong about the sleep.'

If Muldoon, in many ways one of the greatest poets of our time, wants to line up with Ashbery, another whose brilliance is something entirely of his own devising, then he might find himself on the end of a similar charge. Not that he sends one to sleep. On the contrary, he threatens to keep us awake too long, and in the process I felt exhausted. That wouldn't usually be what I want from poetry, though.