Reviews for Poems, 1968-1998

The average rating for Poems, 1968-1998 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-01-04 00:00:00 Lisa Amundson There were plenty of intriguing poems in this collection and I particularly liked his "Hopewell Haiku" sequences, as in these two examples: A stone at its core, this snowball's the porcelain knob on winter's door. On the road to town a racoon in party mask. Gray shawl. Gray ballgown. Some of the poems I enjoyed most in this earlier sections of the book include "Keen," "Vaquero," "Tea," and several others, including the oft-mentioned "Wind and Tree." They are very well done and indeed, there are musical echoes in his early work of Seamus Heaney. But sweet baby Jesus...the entire section of "Madoc: A Mystery" was a mind-numbing yawn-inducer. Muldoon obviously has all the literary skills and tools he needs to write good if not great poems, which ends up making a lot of his work rather unfulfilling for me because he seems to not want to use those skills consistently. He writes lines like: "However, I might allegorize some oscaraboscarabinary bevy". He is a smarty pants certainly, with apparently sometimes impenetrable intellectual ambitions for his poems, but I do not find him a consistently enjoyable or rewarding poet when he is exercising that part of himself on the page. As Dwight Garner stated in the New York Times: "His work only rarely trips off the tongue." That being said, I certainly don't mind "difficulty" in my poets. But Muldoon does not quite often enough (for me at least) pull off the feat of making the difficult poem also enjoyable and worthwhile, in contrast to, say, Geoffrey Hill.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-03-13 00:00:00 Trevor Leal Muldoon is my new favorite poet. He manages to combine self examination (maybe) with an utterly unsentimental mastery of language, sounds and multiple meanings. It's almost as if his poetry is saying that if it felt like it it could be L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, if it wanted to it could be political polemic, if it needed to it could be formalist, if absolutely pushed it could be autobiographical, it allows narrative to lurk without ever really letting it out of its closet. It's a poetry that belongs to no school, is no doubt unschoolable, just utterly brilliant. And I usually don't rave, really.