Reviews for Subtle Subversions: Reading Golden Age Sonnets by Iberian Women

The average rating for Subtle Subversions: Reading Golden Age Sonnets by Iberian Women based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-12-21 00:00:00 Todd Darby I stopped reading this one on page 263, but I demand full credit for the whole book because it was such a God-awful slog. Muldoon is an Irish poet crusted with prizes and now the poetry editor for the New Yorker, selecting poems in an inexplicably bizarre fashion (and not selecting mine, damn him). This particular book is prose, consisting of his Oxford Lectures, obviously. Here's how it works: each lecture consists of Muldoon selecting one particular poem by a famous poet "12 O'clock News" by Eliz. Bishop, "Sea Poppies" by H.D., etc. Muldoon then goes into full critical mode, blithering away with what the jacket blurb describes as "the boundlessness created by influence, what Robert Frost meant when he insisted that "the way to read a poem in prose or verse is in the light of all the other poems ever written."" Sounds interesting, eh? It is not, trust me. What this all boils down to is a really big book full of a sort of literary Where's Waldo? approach to poetry, giving Muldoon an opportunity to show off his admittedly vast learning and familiarity with poetry while at the same time allowing him to make a fool out of himself. For example, in Robert Frost's "The Mountain," a bunch of space is taken up with Mt. Hor, which sounds like hoar as in hoar frost, as in Robert Frost and so on in an exercise in learned wit that was as relentless as it was pointless, for example, "ice" is used five times in Frost's famous essay "The Figure a Poem Makes" Muldoon's learning too often turns to cleverness and an elephantine sort of postmodern "play" that I found insufferable. Admittedly, I had a little over a hundred pages to go on this book before I grumpily tossed it aside, but I never did find out why it was called "the end of the poem," since I detected nothing of substance about the problem of poetry in contemporary culture (and there is a problem, yes indeed). Note to Heather: I bought this one in Bloomington, dutiful conferee that I was - and I bought it new, which means I paid full price, dammit!

Review # 2 was written on 2018-08-23 00:00:00 Thomas Romanoff Muldoon loves to follow definition and etymology into places where no one else has ever ventured. The main reference in this book is the Oxford English Dictionary, and I doubt if there are more than two pages that go by without some reference to it. He can call it close reading, but it often just feels silly -- particularly if a reader is looking for the interpretation of a particular poem. Muldoon sets up that expectation, starting each essay with a poem and a very good poem, but he usually is much more interested in the places Paul Muldoon's imagination takes him. He will fall back on standard interpretative formulae -- Freud, for instance, in addition to a deconstructionist's associations. For Muldoon, Frost and Moore and Day-Lewis for instance couldn't use frost or more or day without evoking their names. And all of that can get very tedious. But in those moments when he moves past his intellectual showiness, his efforts to show the places his brain can take him, and actually talk about the poem at hand, he can actually say some brilliant and important things. I really did enjoy his readings of Lowell's "George III," H.D.'s "Sea Poppies," and Tsvetayeva's "Poem of the End." And sometimes when he allowed himself to do some biographical criticism, I was completely intrigued. In the end, I can't deny or denigrate his absolute love for the process of the poem. At the very depth of his being he believes this art is important -- and this is a belief I find most clearly and consistently in Irish poets. They seem to have overcome the ironic dismissal of the art that is often voiced even by dedicated practitioners of it. And he has that sense that the poem can transcend the poet. In his last essay he writes " The notion that a poet might 'know more that he spoke of' is connected ... with the idea that the poem ... might 'know more' than the poet." And that's an idea that seems absolutely central to my understanding of the art. All of Muldoon's trips far into etymology can illustrate this point, and, finally, become more helpful.