On Muldoon

On Muldoon

I would have to agree with the Irish poet who quoted in the article Reading Paul Muldoon, that Muldoon’s technique is very much like “walking on air.” The forms he takes, sestinas, sonnets, etc, are highly mastered. His line breaks and rhymes are well thought and never teeter on trite or cliché, instead lines that may be capable of these qualities read sarcastically or ironically. He throws in so many Irish place names, names of people, from those in his personal life to Greek Gods, that unwinding one of his poems takes thorough research and contemplation. I often found myself looking up words which had many definitions. I found myself struggling with which definition to fit into the poem, and often found that perhaps multiple ones could work. I found myself skeptical of my readings, feeling I had not gotten the entire picture of what Muldoon was after, even in his shorter pieces that require less investigation. Poems such as “At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999” could take years to master, or perhaps the entirety of their meaning is impossible to possess by anyone other than Muldoon himself. In a few readings of this poem all I could accomplish was the fact that it carried themes of destruction, due to a hurricane, stability and instability in both actual structures and people, memories of places, individuals, and objects. It contained found language of street signs and postings found in buildings, and it often found itself describing the poet’s son Asher, how he looked and the movements he was making.