Maggot: Poems - Hardcover

Muldoon, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374200327 ISBN 13: 9780374200329

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

Synopsis

Of Plan B, an interim volume that included several of the poems in Maggot, Robert McCrum recently said in the London Observer that "Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet's task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection." In his eleventh full-length book, Muldoon reminds us that he is a traditional poet who is steadfastly at odds with tradition. If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn't your father's poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W. B. Yeats's remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are "sex and the dead," Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It's no accident that the centerpiece of Maggot is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its subject the urge to memorialize the scenes of fatal automobile accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title sequence but also many of the round songs that characterize Maggot, and has led Angela Leighton, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, to see these new poems as giving readers "a thrilling, wild, fairground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish."

About this title

About the Author

Paul Muldoon is the author of ten books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Moy Sand and Gravel (FSG, 2002) and, most recently, Horse Latitudes (FSG, 2006). He teaches at Princeton University.

Reviews

Northern Irish poet and New Yorker poetry editor Muldoon’s work is accomplished and deeply witty, but rarely personal or moving. His is a poetry of subterfuge, the self hidden under wild and wily rhymes and puns, distracting the reader with tossed-off tidbits of learning, burning past empathy in a rush of dissonant language. But mortality has a way of deepening beyond the poetic surface. Not surprisingly, Muldoon keeps up his punning ways: the title (also the name of a multipart poem) refers not only to the obvious flesh-devouring insects but also to a whimsical thought. But the book is filled with haunting images of decay and doom, from hares grazing dangerously on a runway to a geisha’s body found on a Japanese mountain. A friend with cancer becomes “sufficient, after your radiotherapy, / to trigger a dirty bomb alert,” but the light tone flies away as the poet feels “Another heart-pang / neither badger nor hedgehog grease may assuage.” Muldoon has recently said that he could give up poetry, but this book suggests it isn’t giving up on him. --Patricia Monaghan

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374200327
• ISBN 13: 9780374200329
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144