Now I have come back to a third full read of this collection. Perhaps my opinion will change? Perhaps I will sprout wings and black feathers and drop my shits across pedestrians of the mighty Brooklyn Bridge- alas, I have not eaten.

Without a word, Muldoon remains the greatest living poet working in English, a small honour for the age. With these words perhaps the condition is ebbed, but there are no challengers, none rising to howl his musth. Here is no longer technical virtuosity in the sense of anyone's intrigue, but the extreme proficiency of the casino dealer who has perfected his way with cards, and cards alone. It becomes routine, it becomes as boring to read as the reader is forced to imagine it is to do. Best at what is sadly rote. The little joy of his jibes and strange associations, factoids, are all present but the phrase and music is limp. What is the heart that once infused this particular style, belonging to no one else, is quite remote. All of that vortex, the dusky lull, is harder to feel in this collection compared to great poems like 'Longbones'. Muldoon is a drifted moth, and flight is grand yes, but something in this reader grows against his unbearable unstill, unswooping, as if he is afraid if he stops for a moment on yon branch a gash on his wing will become evident. Most of the poems are hypermotile in that way, and hard to take seriously- and the ridiculousness and factification don't preclude seriousness. He himself has proven this time and time again. Is my stomach speaking?

Make for instance, the obvious comparison between 'By the Time You Read This'

By the time you read this I’ll be gone

for a newspaper and quart of milk

never to return, a half-mowed lawn

leading to me as a scroll of silk

once led to the mulberry silkworm.

By the time you read this I’ll be gone

AWOL in spite of the fact, in terms

of domesticity, I’ve outshone

even the heedful trumpeter swan

that spends five weeks constructing a nest.

By the time you read this I’ll be gone

less because of some profound unrest

than my fascination with the Cree

and the sandhills of Saskatchewan

into which windswept immensity,

by the time you read this, I’ll be long gone.

and his starmaking 'Why Brownlee Left' (which is not his best, but good). Something trite has entered the instinct in the guise of a Virgil, what is no Virgil. Muster up your talents, old man, and beat his talonns off the gunwale.

Amusingly, the collection contains at least his second poem on Chang and Eng I've read; his second in Hay (?) is better. Seems like an overrepresented freakshow in the literary world (I swear I've read 5 poems with these little freaks featured), but I guess some people like their siamese twins.

Highlights in 'A Least Bittern' and 'Welcome to the Irish Alps'. Those auld strengths of his remain in nature poetry and elegaic verse (pretty much the highlight of his 21st century career)- but I want more. Shall I say it simplest? Here is a poet whose work makes me happy, and that is not the reason I love all the poets I love. This collection did not make me happy.

joyce

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