A Delightful Muldoodle

...several are two-line epigrams, and all but four are printed facing Bill Doyle's attractive, sometimes predictable black-and-white photographs: a cloth-capped scarecrow...

...It may only be funny for readers who've actually seen herds of sheep with flanks, backs or pates dyed a luminescent, punk-rock blue: In this dependence on local referents it, too, typifies, not so much Muldoon, but Muldoodles...

...O dark dark dark," Eliot wrote of his Londoners, "They all go into the dark,/ The vacant interstellar spaces...

...The first, best sonnet in Kerry Slides shows, if not quite Muldoon at his most powerful, then how goodhe is on off days and holidays, in the most casual among the tones he owns: On a night when a hay-stack, silverwet, bulges out from under a fishing-net so I can barely tell sea from land I remember the wreckers of Inch Strand who would gather there on a stormy night and tie a lantern or hurricane-light to some wild-eyed pony's mane or tail that it might flash and flare and flick and flail like a lantern tied to a storm-tossed mast, till the captain who d hoped to escape Dingle Bay's insidious shallows and shoals now suddenly found himself foundering, fast, surrounded by wild-eyed men in capes wielding pikes and pitchforks and heavypoles...

...a lost-looking rowboat in choppy water, seen from directly overhead...

...commitments in the Four Quartets...

...Among his hallmarks are: sonnets, comic or extravagant approximate rhymes, self-suspicion, abrupt transitions, sex and violence, explorers and quests, and grammatical constructions that shift and roll like spinning, and probably rigged, roulette wheels...

...I hold the front page of The Armagh Observer to the fireplace...

...Heaney has memorably dubbed the big books (like 1994's The Annals of Chile, or 1991's Madoc) "Mulbooms," and the slim in-between sequences "Muldoodles...

...Every five years or so since the '70s Muldoon has published another dense, ambitious volume of poetry, including at least one long narrative sequence...

...The photo on the opposite page is of a white sign reading, in part, "ANTIPOST BETTING ON ALL MAJOR EVENTS/ HORSES DOGS FOOTBALL POLITICS") The top implement in Muldoon's tool kit is the verb, or wrench, called "reminds me of," and being constantly reminded is a good way to figure out what's really on your mind, and to bring to entertaining scrutiny very many of your readers' sensibilia while you're at it...

...Muldoon published his first book of poems in 1972, when he was in his early 20s, and has been expanding his ambitions and sharpening his wit ever since...

...shade/ of mint or peach"—ambiguous, that is, between pale green and pale orange...

...Its 31 poems (30 in English, one in Irish, all untitled, and collectively dated " 1986-1995") seem to be the fruit of repeated visits to County Kerry, on Ireland's southwest coast, whose capes, beaches and villages remain famously wet, famously beautiful and famously distant from all things urban (not to mention from Muldoon's own upbringing in County Armagh, Northern Ireland...

...The repeated or's, the flamboyant self-revisions, the objects compared to themselves or their clones—as "a lantern" resembles "a lantern"—are especially Muldoon's, and set up one of his favorite points: that the right context can make almost anything pass for almost anything else...

...you probably do know who Ian Paisley is, and you might have noticed "O dark, dark, dark" as a joke about Eliot, about the religious (or would Muldoon call them religiose...

...A door that doubles as a political border...

...The photograph also creates a joke on "Fez," in Morocco, as against "fez," a hat...

...in between these elaborate proj ects come small books of short poems and divertissements (usually on Ireland's Gallery Press...

...Stephen's Day...

...Consciously, gratefully, delightedly, we let ourselves be deceived in literature (the poem suggests) so that, in life, we may not be fooled again...

...the reinforcing planks and ribbons around the hat could suggest a crucifix...

...No poem here exceeds 14 lines...

...It's 1969...

...This comes opposite a cowboy-style hat hung, crown out, on a reinforced timber fence, door or wall...

...You will need to know that Wrenboys wear elaborate costumes and sing traditional music on St...

...Facing-page photographs often, as here, create the chicken-and-egg problem: Who is illustrating whom...

...This is light verse only if you're not listening, and it ought to make as much sense in Denver as in Dingle...

...but readers who have found, elsewhere, how wonderful this poet can be (the Farrar Straus or Faber and Faber Selecteds will do fine) may find Muldoon's travel sequence-cumphoto album not only diverting, but accomplished and delightful—even profound...

...And what door or shed could be "a...

...Should we imagine a Paul Muldoon who wrote each poem to accompany its photograph, or did Doyle pick, or even take, photographs to go with already-written poems...

...Reviewed by Stephen Burt Contributor, "Times Literary Supplement," "Boston Review" Something like a consensus now deems Paul Muldoon the best Irish poet younger than Seamus Heaney, and American readers are figuring out—only about a decade late—that he's among the most inventive poets in the English language...

...Is that last line an execution by firing squad, like those the Irish Easter Martyrs faced...

...Other epigrams won't: They depend on your recognizing Peig Sayers' autobiography (a dreaded set text in Irish language classes), or Fionn and the Fianna, or (former Republic of Ireland Prime Minister) "Charlie" Haughey Muldoon's major lyrics can be just as odd or as obscure, but they don't revolve around their data points the way much of Kerry Slides can...

...The actual...

...Muldoon's poem slides from comically extravagant, fetched-up exotica (which melts as we examine it) into local color, into gunfire...

...Indeed, one of them—printed opposite a wet, smooth, squarish stone girdled by a wet rope— could be called "On the Whole World": A fisherman nurses his 'Ranga on the rocks', the rusty cocktail named after a shipwreck, then knocks it back...

...The poet's previous small-scale book, the diaristic sonnets collectively titled The Prince of the Quotidian, gave us a series of friendly peeks at Muldoon's social life and household in and near Princeton, where he teaches: "The more I think of it, the more I've come to love/ the tidal marshes of Hackensack,/ the planes stacked/ over Newark...

...lust enough apocalyptic energy gets into that sixth line to discredit apocalyptic temperaments, or to show us why Muldoon is so often driven to construct a flexible, durable alternative to them...

...dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of Ian Paisley's face in a blind rage...

...If not, what do we make of Muldoon's use of Dante's terza rimai But it would be tendentious to give every one of the Great Leaps Muldoon makes some clearly political motive: The transcontinental stretches and loops his imagination favors stand not only for political analogies, but for the Seven-League Boots built into all kinds of language, for the saving power in puns and asides: Every time I order a bagel with lox and a schmear . in some New York or 'New York style' deli I leap from the 'lox' in Leixlip to the 'schmear' in Smenvick (to the 'butter creek' in the lee of the 'butter mountain') and the dragon-prowed ships appear whose end is destruction, I say, whose God is their belly full of butter and cheese and cream cheese and the extra-thick milkshakes in a New York or New York style' soda fountain...

...Bringing out these odd relations often requires sheaves of allusions, some of which American readers can get: A Wrenboy's wand clatters down our slates...

...A damp little holiday cottage in Camp...

...a corbelled stone hut...

...Some of Muldoon's epigrams could be titled after Ben Jonson's formula "On an X"—"On the Blasket Islands," "On Luminescent Sheep Dye...

...The ambiguity of the photographs, the questions about what, if anything, each documents, chimes with the poems' own ambivalence over whether their images count simply as local color, or as part of a political record: Not only do Dingle houses effervesce like sherbets in rain, giving one a sense of Fez, perhaps, or somewhere in Spain, but I've come upon a ruined shed at the end of an overgrown lane with the half-door a rumpled shade of mint or peach—the jerkin of a fusilier after a fusillade...

...Maybe...

...a smart-looking man in an open coat, trudging among high weeds, shouldering three hoes...

...A few sodden sods of turf in the grate...

...If the Vikings, if the barbarians, raid us again, perhaps they will turn out to want, not Armageddon, but simply better (or enough) food...

...Kerry Slides represents Muldoon's return to things (obtrusively) Irish, to troubled history, coastal rain, rural hospitality and divided loyalties...

...Kerry Slides is surely a Muldoodle...

...This elegant book should be nobody's introduction to Muldoon...

...Sometimes the photos and the poems are comic comments on each other, as when a man driving sheep among hedges turns his back to this couplet: "This cobalt-quiffed ewe among the fuchsia's/ part blue-rinsed Grandmama, part Sid Vicious...

...These feigning, cunning locals join the ever-increasing tribe of Muldoon's symbols for himself: The author who contrives to puzzle, trick or strand his readers also teaches them a lesson...