'Our Lady of Ardboe', Paul Muldoon (Critical Essay‪)‬

Poems can matter in many ways. This poem matters a lot to me personally, partly because it is responsible for an extension of my taste; but I think that it matters in more notable cultural ways too. I suspect that it also matters as much as any of his work does to Paul Muldoon himself although it has not, I think, been very significantly discussed by his critics. Certainly he makes a point of reprinting it in both his Selected Poems 1968-1983 (1986) and his New Selected Poems 1968-1994 (1996). I was an undergraduate in Oxford when I first read a Muldoon poem. Someone came around the college in, it must have been, 1972, selling a little magazine called Caret. This was clearly a very enterprising enthusiast because this is one of the very few times I remember any such thing happening, although I do recall the neatly coiffured Jon Silkin hawking copies of Stand around the pubs--ever ready, it seemed, for a rigorous intellectual debate, even in pretty raucous surroundings and with those not blessed with his preternatural sobriety. I bought Caret and read a poem by Muldoon about what I would in those days, I suppose, have called Red Indians. I don't think he published the poem in any of his books subsequently, and I cannot remember its title: but of course aspects of this subject matter became hugely important in his subsequent work.