Paul Muldoon, One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (Faber)
Before Christmas I was reading Clair Wills’ Reading
Paul Muldoon, which
goes as far as Hay,
in 1999,
treading upon a thousand things you might think
worth knowing of loose associations and abstruse
hallucination. I can’t compete with that.
Heaven knows how in those amazing days
I won a prize, reviewing Hay,
in Acumen. My
secret, as dark as bitumen,
was to pay attention only to the poems I thought
I saw something in, and not mention,
for heaven’s sake, anything opaque.
And now it’s fifteen years later, we’ve had the romance
of the century, and there could be a thousand things
worth saying about each of the thousands of things
useful to know, to reflect
upon, or genuflect in bleak admiration
of Paul Muldoon’s 45 years as an overnight sensation.
His in memoriam for
Seamus Heaney
is an amalgam, seemingly begun
where it started from, with Cuthbert,
that cuddy-wifter, and otterdom
and Lindisfearna, as Hughes’ Raincharm
had once been about Devon
rain but became
the first laureate poem of his tenure,
on the birth of William. While in Cuba
on vowels are esoteric parlour games
opening alleyways into diasporas of themes.
It’s hard to fall in love with cool
that doesn’t look you in the eye,
is always one more step ahead and fugitive
from one’s embrace. I fear that I might drop
the thread and it is never lucrative
to try to be hip instead.
The penalties are punitive.
So, all the febrile rank and file,
the lads in the academies, will welcome
new Muldoon, as I do,
and all that I say, I say here
in a pastiche like a pistaccio
cracked open by Pinnochio
that sounds like an unfinished arpeggio.