POETRY: MaggotBy Paul Muldoon Faber, 120pp. £14.99

'WHO KNEW the body is a footnote / to the loss of its own heat,"muses the speaker of The Humors of Hakonein or around the centre of Paul Muldoon's Maggot, his deliciously erotic and expansive but equally disturbing new collection. In this poem, one of the longest in a book where the prolongation of poems through sequencing and other forms of elongation is common, Muldoon conjures figures that seem drawn from a Japanese anime film or cartoon strip. Alluding to the sexual allure and, at the same time, physical violence that often accompany that genre, Muldoon revels in and reveals the ways in which so-called traditional verse form can engage with and enhance the forms of popular culture. The Humors of Hakoneis a brilliant poem about failure, but the end of the poem, for Muldoon, is often its beginning, not least in terms of his ability to take his point of departure from the formal and thematic moments or limits when other poets might want to throw in the towel.

So, while the speaker at the end of The Humors of Hakone might claim that

All I had to go on was a single maggot puparium

to help me substantiate the date of a corduroy road over a quag

much more is in fact brought into view in the course of the poem. The speaker's "All I had to go on" is so much more than one would reckon, as the opening image of the "poem decomposing around what looks like an arrow" points, through the lines and sections that follow, in directions at once arrestingly exotic and sublimely banal. "Like an engine rolling on after a crash, / long after whatever it was made a splash,"as Muldoon writes at the end of A Hummingbird.

So it is with so many of the poems in Maggot, a collection in which poems always add up to more than the sum of their (often damaged) parts, no matter how clearly delineated and carefully structured those parts might be. Muldoon’s ability to play with form and structure, metre and rhyme, is exemplary in contemporary poetics, and it is fitting that his latest collection contains poems dedicated to practitioners of the art who have been recognised for their aesthetic innovativeness and exactitude, from Richard Wilbur to John Ashbery, Samuel Beckett to Charles Baudelaire. The international and transhistorical literary engagement suggested by these figures is enhanced in another direction and, indeed, into another dimension, by poems that evoke or respond to paintings by figures such as Sandro Botticelli and François Boucher. Together with Maggot’s stunning cover artwork (an arresting photograph by the American artist Chris Jordan is used on this Faber edition), they reveal Muldoon’s deep interest in the plastic as well as the verbal arts or, more correctly, in the interplay between these forms of expression. At the same time, while many of the poems here make deft and detailed reference and allusion to texts that might strike some readers as esoteric or archaic (from Fynes Moryson’s An History of Ireland, from the Year 1599 to 1603 to Charles Barrett’s Wild Life of Australia and New Guinea), there are also moments in Maggot – in The Fling, for example, or The Windshield – when Muldoon gives us poems of powerful directness in their attention to particular moments of intimacy, memory, mourning and loss.

To read Muldoon is to reread Muldoon. There is no escaping this fact given the way that his works often play and replay patterns of image and sound across whole collections and between volumes. In his sonnet On the Sonnet the great Romantic poet John Keats suggested that poets should learn “to weigh the stress / Of every chord, and see what may be gain’d / By ear industrious, and attention meet”. In the poems of Maggot – particularly in the title sequence but also in pieces such as Love Poem with Pig, Nope (and its partner poem Yup), Extraordinary Rendition, Balls, Hummingbird (which is followed, of course, by Another Hummingbird, just as the earlier piece Geese is followed by More Geese) – Muldoon shows not only that he is one of the most inventive sonneteers ever to have written in English but also that he has an ear as industrious and alert as that of any poet working in the language today.

Sometimes the reader too must work damn hard to keep up with him, and Clair Wills and Tim Kendall are just two critics who have written on the complex patterning that underlies Muldoon’s aesthetic. However, the critical unpacking of his poetry, and the necessity for such work in relation to a poet as difficult as Muldoon can be, should not deter readers who are interested in the ways that poetry, at its best, tests and extends the semantic, structural and sonic possibilities of language.

" Yet by my broken bones / I tell new weather" Muldoon wrote in Wind and Tree, one of his earliest published poems. His forensic attention to the breakages and disruptions of self and world in Maggot suggests important connections with his earlier work, but the volume in itself is also one of the most powerful to be published by him in a career marked by consistent lyric inventiveness, from New Weather(1973) to the Pulitzer Prize- winning volume Moy Sand and Gravel (2006). "Yet it seems I've managed nothing more / than to have fetched up here," he writes at the end of the first section of Plan B, the book's opening poem, but together the poems of Maggotsuggest that he is a poet who knows his art – and where it's at – better than most.

Philip Coleman is a lecturer in the school of English at Trinity College Dublin