MULDOON'S LATEST, I am happy to confirm, contains plenty of what you are expecting/hoping to find in a volume by Muldoon.
Exuberant play with a variety of closed forms--sonnet, quaternary, pantoum, some you don't know the names of, some that probably do not even have names yet? Check.
Whirligig simultaneous development in the same poem of deeply unlike subject matter, like the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of glam rock? Check.
Outrageous rhymes (e.g., Aristotle's star pupil / Mott the Hoople)? Check. Several checks.
Due honor to those to whom honor is due? Check! ("Near Izium," on Ukraine's valiant self-defense.)
Oh, and of course, the long final poem, check, but moreover this one--"The Castle of Perseverance"--can stand beside "Yarrow" as one of Muldoon's most moving and vulnerable poems.
And there's also the things you were not expecting but are happy to find: a couple of surprisingly moving Christmas poems ("Nativity, 2020" and "Whilst the Ox and Ass") and a convincing, cliché-less acknowledgement of one's own mortality ("The MRI").
Like the Union veteran in the Winslow Homer painting on the book's cover, swinging his scythe, Muldoon is still out there after all these years, gathering the harvest.
