IT HAS BEEN a while, a few years even, since I attempted a poetry week--that is, writing about a poetry collection each day for seven days in a row. I'm feeling confident. Let's go.
I actually wrote about Muldoon's latest book back in November, when it was published, in a (much) more prestigious blog. I used up my keenest perceptions on that occasion, I'm afraid, and have little else to say here except that I love Paul Muldoon's poetry and have since I first came across it, back in 1983, when I picked up Why Brownlee Left--his first American book publication, I believe, but his third in all. I haven't missed a one since.
The second item in Frolic and Detour begins with the utterly Muldoonian tour de force, "Encheiresin Naturae," not just a crown of sonnets but a heroic crown of sonnets, with a fifteenth sonnet formed of the first lines of the preceding fourteen. A few other poets could do that, I suppose, but what other could match Muldoon's carouseling imagination and combinatory powers? Technical agility, mad erudition, a playfulness that always finds some indirect, hidden route to the dead serious--it's all still there, in this sequence and in the book's long closing title poem (another Muldoon hallmark), as neat and surprising a tribute as the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair got in its fiftieth anniversary year, much as "Encheiresin Naturae" is the last word in Easter Rising centennial tributes.
Paul Muldoon. Almost seventy, but still letting his freak flag fly, and may he do so for many, many years more.
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