Hay: Poems

...Than Muldoon's other recent volumes. Not to say it's an easy read. Bits of the Irish language, proverbs, Celtic legend, Japanese and native American lore, Hiberno-English, allusions and elisions packed with every poem, this collection does echo, as the publisher's blurb suggests, a bit of Muldoon's adapted state of New Jersey's forebear William Carlos Williams at times. His translations of the old Irish verse Pangur Ban and two Rilke poems show that he's skilled at rendering into solidity other voices besides the many within his own imagination tumbling forth here in typically erudite and rather daunting fashion. Sleeve notes--inspired by on various rock albums anticipates Nick Hornby's essays on rock songs by a few years, and Muldoon's growing immersion in his American surroundings and family life makes for entertaining, if again often puzzling, explorations. This book's best read following Madoc and The Annals of Chile, for it builds upon relationships established in these previous collections, which are even more challenging than the usually briefer forays into the metaphorical and metaphysical here, one of the best of which begins the book. "The Mudroom" casts about a heap of junk and treasure to uncover ancient Judaic archetypes within a country shed--just one example of the juxtapositions Muldoon's mind works within to create disturbing as well as enlightening scenarios that linger and jumble in the mind after you close these dense if terse pages.

I enjoyed the opportunity of hearing a reading by Paul Muldoon last spring and this semester I'm taking a writing of poetry class. I had to do a presentation on a living poet and I picked up one of his latest collections and it's like the title of this review, delightful. There are so many different styles of eccentric poems in this one collection and some that contain such obscure literary references that it invokes a sense of bewilderment and leads to a trail of website-hunting to figure out what he's talking about. But it's okay, because many of the poems can be enjoyed at face value, but if you want to dig deeper you can. He's one dang clever guy and this collection is definitely enjoyable.

Great book. Absolutely wonderful. Buy it.(I had written a longer, more interesting review, but it was apparently lost on the web.)

Is it possible for one person to be the best American poet and the best Irish poet at the same time? Muldoon certainly lays a strong claim to both titles: his Irishness lends him a musicality far superior to that achieved by most contemporary Americans, while his American side is the source of a far-ranging brashness, an ambition, scope and post- modern adventurousness that makes many Irish poets look rather, well, staid. "Hay" is a brave and experimental volume, more Byronic than ironic (though there's plenty of both) that takes place in a mostly domestic setting. As Muldoon wanders around his house and neighborhood and reports on what passes before his eyes and through his mind, the reader is treated to a wild and ceaseless cinematic display that is at times violent, at times kooky, not infrequently nostalgic, and often reminiscent of of Borges, Rilke, or Berryman (not to mention Kurosawa, Kubrick, and Scorsese.) "Long Finish" probably is the most moving piece here, one of the best love poems of the last ten or twenty years, while "The Bangle, Slight Return" is is an intriguing crossword slash jigsaw puzzle that promises boundless entertainment and befuddlement. This book should be sold in airports, distributed free to hotel rooms . . . it's groovy, baby!

The poems of _Hay_, apart from being a comprehensive catalogue of poetic forms -- each with Muldoon's characteristic out-Byroning of Byron -- contain moments when coy formal play is no longer a barrier to sense, but which make Muldoon's meaning more poignant. One realizes that his words _feel_; they are not, however, fraught with meaning, nor are they wound up in the easy melodrama of "the Troubles," of childrearing, or of being middle-aged. His aural and visual twists and tricks exist not as their own purpose, but to define the beautiful and chaotic moments of the poet's recent life, and to tie it, by assonance perhaps, to ours. Read and memorize "Long Finish" for the good of your psyche.