Moy Sand and Gravel: Poems
- Book Review,
by Paul Muldoon
From Publishers Weekly
This first full volume since Muldoon's monumental Poems 1968-1998 reveals one of the English-speaking world's most acclaimed poets still at the top of his slippery, virtuosic game. Born in Northern Ireland, for more than a decade Muldoon has lived, taught and raised a family in Princeton, N.J. Hay (1998) showed Muldoon incorporating his wife's Jewish-American heritage, and his life as a father, into a poetics previously noted for its formal complexity, its shaggy-dog-story narratives, and its interest in Irish history. This substantial collection furthers Hay's subjects. It succeeds with fast-paced poems of suburban observation and whimsical memory in difficult forms: some inherited (terza rima, sestina, tercets, haiku, catechism, Yeats's "Prayer for My Daughter" stanza), others invented (a sonnet, each of whose first 12 lines ends in "draw"). Occasional poems return to the Irish Troubles Muldoon has long, off and on, described: "A Brief Discourse on Decommissioning" explains "you can't make bricks without the straw that breaks the camel's back." The book's most serious poems ground themselves instead in Muldoon's household. "The Stoic" meditates on a miscarriage "our child already lost from view before it had quite come into range," while the long closing poem places Muldoon's young son Asher in a context that combines Irish and Jewish history with Victorian wilderness stories, lines cribbed from Yeats, and Muldoon's own comic postures: "I, the so-called Goy from the Moy." A few of Muldoon's translations (Horace, Caedmon, Montale) seem slight, and several poems rely, perhaps too heavily, on allusions to Muldoon's own previous work; take those out, though, and what remains is a complicated network of verse declarations, stunts and depictions that may be fun for, and turn out to describe, a whole family.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Following on the heels of Poems 1968-1998, Muldoon's latest volume exhibits a tantalizing mix of dichotomies. The language of rural Ireland (where he was raised) cohabits with that of a professor at both Princeton and Oxford. First, consider "moy" in the title: the OED defines it as an adjective meaning "mild, gentle; demure; also, affected in manners, prim" or as a noun, meaning a "measure for salt; bushel." And all the words that follow are chosen with equal care for heightened ambiguity. Munificence is juxtaposed with munitions, while aunts is rhymed with taunts and fuss with orthodox, almost daring readers to roll and twist the words in their mouths. The poet convincingly joins such disparate elements as guns and butter in these narratives, using unfamiliar imagery and missing pieces, reminiscent of John Ashbery's poetry. Even when he's writing about the familiar, as in his masterly love poem "As," he alerts readers to new ways of seeing the world around them. The use of traditional forms might well make this book accessible to those not accustomed to reading poetry. An important purchase for all libraries. Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Among the few significant poets of our half-century."--Tim Kendall, The Guardian
"Paul Muldoon is a shape-shifting Proteus to readers who try to pin him down...Those who interrogate Muldoon's poems find themselves changing shapes each time he does. . .authentically touched or delighted."--Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review
A glittering new collection from "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War"--The Times Literary Supplement
Review
"Among the few significant poets of our half-century."--Tim Kendall, The Guardian
"Paul Muldoon is a shape-shifting Proteus to readers who try to pin him down...Those who interrogate Muldoon's poems find themselves changing shapes each time he does. . .authentically touched or delighted."--Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review
A glittering new collection from "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War"--The Times Literary Supplement
Book Description
Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening, as gritty as they are graceful, these poems seem capable of taking in almost anything, and anybody, be it a Tuareg glimpsed on the Irish border, Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth I, a hunted hare, William Tell, William Butler Yeats, Sitting Bull, Ted Hughes, an otter, a fox, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Joscelyne, un unearthed pit pony, a loaf of bread, an outhouse, a killdeer, Oscar Wilde, or a flock of redknots. At the heart of the book is an elegy for a miscarried child, and that elegiac tone predominates, particularly in the elegant remaking of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" with which the book concludes, where a welter of traffic signs and slogans, along with the spirits of admen, hardware storekeepers, flimflammers, fixers, and other forebears, are borne along by a hurricane-swollen canal, and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matter of our age.
About the Author
Paul Muldoon is the author of eight previous books of poetry. He teaches at Princeton University and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.
Excerpted from Moy Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
HARD DRIVE With my back to the wall
and a foot in the door
and my shoulder to the wheel
I would drive through Seskinore. With an ear to the ground
and my neck on the block
I would tend to my wound
in Belleek and Bellanaleck. With a toe in the water
and a nose for trouble
and an eye to the future
I would drive through Derryfubble and Dunnamanagh and Ballynascreen,
keeping that wound green. UNAPPROVED ROAD I When we came to the customs post at Aughnacloy, as at Cullaville or Pettigoe, I was holding my breath
as if I might yet again be about to go underwater . . . The fortieth
anniversary of 1916 had somehow fizzled out, the New Year's Eve attack
on Brookeborough ending in the deaths of O'Hanlon and South, while Dev was likely to bring back
internment without trial . . . As we drew
level with the leveled shack I was met by another black-coated, long fellow, though he wore a sky-blue winding-cloth or scarf
wrapped round his mouth and nose, leaving only a slit for him to peer through. II "In the late fifties I was looking for a place," he nestled his coffee cup on its zarf
and turned to me, thirty years later, in Rotterdam . . .
"An ancestral place . . . A place my ancestors knew as Scairbh na gCaorach." "Scairbh na gCaorach" I chewed on my foul madams,
"is now better known as 'Emyvale'
though the Irish name means 'the sheep-steeps' or 'the rampart of rams.' " " 'Rampart of rams?' That makes sense. It was the image of an outcrop of
shale
with a particularly sheer
drop that my ancestors, the 'people of the veil,' held before them as they drove their flocks from tier to tier
through Algeria, Mali, and Libya all the way up to Armagh, Monaghan, and
Louth with -- you'll like this -- a total disregard for any frontier." III "Patrick Regan?" A black-coated R.U.C. man was unwrapping a scarf from
his mouth and flicking back and forth from my uncle's license to his face.
"Have you any news of young Sean South? The last I heard he was suffering from a bad case
of lead poisoning. Maybe he's changed his name to Gone West?"
I knew rightly he could trace us by way of that bottle of Redbreast
under my seat, that carton of Players, that bullion chest of butter.
I knew rightly we'd fail each and every test they might be preparing behind the heavy iron shutters
even now being raised aloft
by men carrying belt saws and blowtorches and bolt cutters. IV As he turned to me again, thirty years later in Rotterdam, the Tuareg doffed his sky-blue scarf "Back in those days I saw no risk
in sleeping under hedges. As a matter of fact I preferred a thorn hedge to a
hayloft because -- you'll like this -- it reminded me of the tamarisks
along the salt route into Timbuktu."
He crossed his forearms lightly under his armpits as if he might be about
to frisk himself, then smiled as he handed me the sky-blue
winding-cloth and a clunking water gourd.
"it had been my understanding that Scairbh na gCaorach meant 'the
crossing of ewes' for scairbh means not 'a ledge' but 'a ford' or, more specifically, 'a
shallow ford.' " And he immediately set off at a jog trot down an unapproved road
near Aughnacloy or Swanlinbar or Lifford. Copyright © 2002 Paul Muldoon
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