Joy in Service on Rue Tagore
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“Is there any living poet with as skilled . . . an ear?" (McSweeney's). The answer resounds: Muldoon is a true original.
Since his 1973 debut, New Weather, Paul Muldoon has created some of the most original and memorable poetry of the past half century. Joy in Service on Rue Tagore sees him writing with the same verve and distinction that have consistently won him the highest accolades.
Here, from artichokes to zinc, Muldoon navigates an alphabet of image and history, through barleymen and Irish slavers to the last running wolf in Ulster. The search involves the accumulated bric-a-brac of a life, and a reckoning along the way of gains against loss. In the poet’s skillful hands, ancient maps are unfurled and brought into focus—the aggregation of Imperial Rome and the dismantling of Standard Oil, the pogroms of a Ukrainian ravine and of a Belfast shipyard. Through modern medicine and warfare, disaster and repair, these poems are electric in their energy, while profoundly humane in their line of inquiry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this expansive outing, Muldoon (Howdie Skelp) displays a certain ruefulness, despite being in full command of "that much-vaunted consistency of tone" (as one of the poems puts it) readers have come to associate with him. Muldoon draws connections between unlikely sources, which lends his work a rambunctious, metaphysical undertone. But there's an overtly political edge to many of the entries here, blending periods and layering symbols to tackle contemporary and historical disaster and subtly explore "the appetite for killing without qualm." "So much else has vanished/ from our lives," Muldoon writes, hitting a lightly apocalyptic note. Odessa becomes twinned with Ross's Mill in Muldoon's native Ulster, and there are warnings for despots, from "a body hanging upside down by a hook/ like a goat hanging in a souk" to a prediction for Putin: "His poker-face and his death-mask/ will be one and the same." Muldoon continues his propensity for the longer poem in sequence and the chiming, lexical harmonies with which he makes symphonies. Lyrical, forthright, and playfully sophisticated, these are poems with a bounce to their step and a finger on history's pulse.
