Paul Muldoon, _Howdie-Skelp_

AS DID EVERY previous Muldoon collection, Howdie-Skelp ends with a long poem. "Plaguey Hill" is a heroic crown of sonnets no less, mainly, but not exclusively, about COVID and the lockdown of spring 2020 (as "Encheiresin Naturae," the heroic crown of sonnets in Muldoon's previous collection, Frolic and Detour, was mainly, but not exclusively, about the 1916 Easter Rising). 

That's not the only long poem here, though. Howdie-Skelp's generous 176 page count includes three other poems longer than ten pages, all of them bristling with classic Muldoonian earmarks: formal ingenuity, bone-dry wit, a boatload of allusions, and slow-building emotional charge.

If one was a boy in the 1950s, as Muldoon and I were, one devoted a good deal of one's attention and imaginative energy to Westerns, so I enjoyed the way cowboys, "Indians," and the landscape of Monument Valley circulated through "American Standard," which not only revives the Muldoon aleatory picaresque of such early poems as "The More a Man Has, The More a Man Wants" but also seems to be spoof-celebrating the centenary of Eliot's The Waste Land ("Shanty. Shanty. Shanty.").

"23 Banned Poems" might not count as a long poem, comprised as  it is of twenty-tree short ones, but their thematic cohesion could be said to give it a single identity. Perhaps in response to the conservatives around the USA who are storming school boards insisting that all books with sexual content  be removed from school libraries, each of the twenty-three poems describes an Old Master painting in which sexuality is well to the foreground (lots of paintings of Susanna and the peeping elders) or going on in a corner somewhere (Bosch) or perhaps in the eye of the beholder (a few paintings of the Last Supper). Have your phone handy so you can inspect the paintings before or while reading the poems. Muldoon is at his saltiest now that he has passed 70, a bit like the Yeats of "Words for Music Perhaps" or the "Three Bushes" poems.

"The Triumph" is a 9-section elegy in terza rima (lots of terza rima in this volume) for the late Irish poet Ciaran Carson. As befits an Ulsterman's tribute to another Ulsterman, emotions are kept on a short leash here, but as the memories and Irish phrases cycle through, the emotions begin to mount nonetheless, going all the deeper for not being directly said.

That's the thing about Muldoon. Virtually every page reveals his fascination (obsession?) with poetic form, and we tend (lazily) to associate devotion to form to emotional dryness, chilliness, sterility. Not in Muldoon. Just try "Salonica," the poem in which the word "howdie-skelp" occurs (the dust jacket flap helpfully glosses "howdie-skelp" as "the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn").  It's about passing the scene of an auto accident--"That young woman's body sprawled by the side of the road" is how it begins--and it's a kind of villanelle on steroids. But dry? Chilly? Sterile? No. As with the Carson elegy, it's tightly cinched but devastating.