Review: '1000 Things Worth Knowing' by Paul Muldoon

I don’t blame myself. Because though I "like poetry" and Paul Muldoon, after the death of his mentor and Northern Irish compatriot, Seamus Heaney, is perhaps the world’s preeminent English-language poet, I have not read much of his work. I blame chance. I blame fashion. I blame the so-called tastes of the so-called general public. I blame the inevitable, unavoidable skew from poetry towards fiction in the study of English literature and university curricula. 

I certainly wouldn’t dare to blame the poet himself. For Muldoon’s CV is of sufficient lustre to back up the greatest-living-poet shtick. While still at Queens University Belfast in 1973, his first major collection, Knowing my Place, was published by Faber and Faber. Since, he has released ten collections, received the T.S. Eliot Prize, for The Annals of Chile (1994), as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), been Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999-2004, as well as president of the Poetry Society, been crowned with the poetry editorship of The New Yorker, picked up a couple of important sounding titles at Princeton and generally become a bigwig in the poetry world. So, when Muldoon gave the eulogy at Heaney’s funeral in 2013, it seemed safe to assume that the mantle had been passed. Yet for that, Muldoon’s poetry is difficult - obstinately - in a way Heaney’s rarely was. 

One Thousand Things Worth Knowing is his twelfth collection. Judging by the reviews, it is classic Muldoon - perhaps too classic for those coming to his poetry for the first time. Heaney’s death practically begins it. He writes in the third stanza of ‘Cuthbert and the Otters’:

I’m at once full of dread and in complete denial.
I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead.

 The Anglo-Saxon “thole” (to bear or suffer) is a word choice typical of Muldoon, never scared to send the reader scuttling for the dictionary before the days of google and certainly not now. The poet’s interest in etymology is conscious - “Refrain as in frenum, a “bridle.”” - and wordplay literally spelled out - “In the way we swap “scuttle” for “scutter””. There is something curiously of the internet, a scent of Wikipedia, running through the poem, as it asks us to compare statements like “The wax moth lives in a beehive proper. It can detect sound/ up to 300 kHz” and “The horse in the stable/ may be trained to follow a scent.” or “A prototype of backgammon/ was played by the Danes.”

Muldoon’s lines follow one another often without explanation. Sure, one gets that this is the point but sometimes it seems that confusion is the sole end. As, in ‘Barrage Balloons, Buck Alec, Bird Flu, and You’, when “The Swede who invented the Aga/ had previously lost his sight to an explosion.” follows, as if naturally, on to memories of The Troubles: 

                    …The rain summoned by a blackbird’s raga
came sweeping over Shankhill, over the burning car
where Boston and Lowther were dumped, having been fingered in the bar
as a Prod and a Pape
enjoying a wee jar together.

To return to ‘Cuthbert and the Otters, as suggestions of Lake District tearooms, Irish bogs and images of otters recur, all threaded together somehow by Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, you certainly feel that Muldoon would be a good man to have at a pub quiz. Or he would if you could be sure even half of it was true… There are a few more long poems in One Thousand Things, including the closer ‘Dirty Data’, which incorporates a prolonged riff on Ben Hur and is addressed to its author Lew Wallace. Perhaps, probably even, it is my failing, but I couldn’t make much sense of these longer poems, though I am sure they will bead many a brow in university classrooms.

The shorter poems are, for me, more successful: ‘Pelt’ teasing out the beguiling double meaning of its title, in two suggestively broken sentences (see bottom). Still, a poem like ‘Catamaran’ is indicative of this expansive collection’s dilemma, even in its moments of concision. “Between Dominica and Martinique/ we go in search of sperm whales…” - the we being the speaker’s family. The poem builds to a kind of history of its title in the third and final stanza, placing the figures there both as a result of the speaker’s dead wife and, poignantly, the vessel they travel on:

A corruption of the Tamil term for “two logs
lashed together with rope or the like,”
the word we use is “catamaran.” 

Yet, it as if, even in this emotive territory, Muldoon cannot resist the self-assured aside of the keynote speaker, dispatched in stanza two:

My son is reading Lord of the Flies. I can think of that book
only as the dog-eared manuscript Charles Monteith would pick
out of the slush pile at Faber’s.
I’m pretty sure Charles recognized
a version of himself in Piggy. The same prep-school anguish.
Same avuncularity. Same avoirdupois.

Perhaps, with the certainty of success, this world has become all a bit too urbane - lacking danger - in Muldoon’s hands. In ‘Near the Grace of God Nail Salon’, ‘set’ in Ghana, an elusive series of images - “slaves pushed from pillar to whipping post”, “a mess of fish in a basket set on a blue latex foam/ mattress pad no/ self-respecting fish would be seen dead on.”, “the military coup/ that ousted Kwame Nkrumah.” - are tied together by a picture of woman and boy - “(her son?)”. At the poem’s limp payoff the speaker muses:

Now I see that his entire outfit, from his football shirt
to his sneakers shining in the dirt,
comes courtesy of Puma.

Is this it? Some lame riff on the ironies of globalisation? Cuba (2) - Cuba being one of Muldoon’s most famous poems - opens:

I’m hanging with my daughter in downtown Havana.
She’s worried people think she’s my mail-order bride.
It might be the Anseo tattooed on her ankle.
It might be the tie-in with that poem of mine.

It’s all rather too self-knowing, too consciously witty, too metropolitan. Muldoon is a wonderful reader of poetry. I had the pleasure of hearing him read his own work in St Andrews (one of the few of countless similar opportunities I did not squander) and his eloquence is plain on the semi-regular New Yorker poetry podcast among others. And it seems undeniable that in purely technical matters, Muldoons remains masterly. Often in One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, the intricacies of form, rhythm and half-rhyme in particular, provide the central coherence, the glimmer of meaning. But it is telling that it is hard to imagine any of these poems being recited rote.

Is there no room for suffering in Muldoon's world beyond the death of Seaney Heaney and the legacy of the Troubles or is the rest just wordplay? I know enough of the poet’s back catalogue to let the original ‘Cuba’ answer the question. 

Cuba 

In her white muslin evening dress. 

‘Who the hell do you think you are 

Running out to dances in next to nothing? 

As though we hadn't enough bother 

With the world at war, if not at an end.’

My father was pounding the breakfast-table.

‘Those Yankees were touch and go as it was — 

If you'd heard Patton in Armagh — 

But this Kennedy's nearly an Irishman 

So he's not much better than ourselves. 

And him with only to say the word. 

If you've got anything on your mind 

Maybe you should make your peace with God.’

I could hear May from beyond the curtain. 

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. 

I told a lie once, I was disobedient once. 

And, Father, a boy touched me once.’

‘Tell me, child. Was this touch immodest? 

Did he touch your breasts, for example?’

‘He brushed against me, Father. Very gently.’ 

Pelt

Now rain rattled

the roof of my car

like holy water

on a coffin lid, 

holy water and mud

landing with a thud

though as I listened

the uproar 

faded to the stoniest

of silences…They piled

it on all day

till I gave way

to a contentment

I’d not felt in years,

not since that winter 

I’d worn the world 

against my skin,

worn it fur side in.