Loads of Learned Lumber

Tuesday, October 8, 2019

Paul Muldoon, _One Thousand Things Worth Knowing_

WHEN I SAW that a new volume from Muldoon was due next month, I thought, crikey, I haven't read the last one yet. I checked its publication date--2015. Does it really take me four years to get around to reading even my favorite poets? Apparently so.

Muldoon is very Muldoonian here: sly, full of curious lore he connects in even more curious ways, the wickedest rhymer aboveground.

The volume's first poem, "Cuthbert and the Otters," is in memory of Seamus Heaney, and manages to touch a lot of Heaney bases (otters, Vikings, words like "darne," "smolt," and "thole") while remaining a poem only Muldoon could have written, Columbanus cheek-by-jowl with Lily Langtry and Erwin Rommel, a demanding stanza form he handles as effortlessly as a limerick, a narrative line that is all knuckleballs and change-ups.

Yes, I have been reading Tyler Kepner's history of baseball in ten pitches. (Didn't take me four years to get to that one!) I wonder--will Muldoon's long residence in the USA lead to him writing a poem or two about baseball? The sequence of poems here on the American Civil War gives me hope.

The volume ends with another long poem, "Dirty Data," this one even more reminiscent than "Cuthbert" of the classic Muldoon picaresques of the eighties, "Immram," "The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants." Nineteen sonnets, rhymed as only Muldoon can rhyme (e.g., "pecs" and "Rolex"), largely about Ben-Hur, book and film. Since the author of the novel, Lew Wallace, was a Civil War officer who later served as governor of New Mexico territory, "Dirty Data" also winds up mentioning the battle of Shiloh, and Billy the Kid, and the translation of Ben-Hur into Irish, and Bloody Sunday, and Lonnie Donegan and the skiffle craze, all woven together as naturally as you please. What, no Rommel? No, but we do get Winston Churchill.

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