Hay, by Paul Muldoon, Faber & Faber, 140pp, £14.99/£7.99 in UK
Paul Muldoon can write about anything with wit, sly inventiveness, formal swagger, and as many layers as you're likely to need of knowing, ironic subversion of self and others, and of poetry itself. The problem with Hay, his latest collection of poems, is that he does all those things to his own too evident satisfaction. The poems, as we've come to expect from this prince of play, are determinedly ludic, but mandarinly modest in ambition, as if, having entered a domain of pure invention, the poet wants to see how far he can survive on wit and form.
"The Mud Room" quickly establishes the destination all the subsequent poems are aimed at: "We followed the narrow track, my love, we followed the narrow/track through a valley in the Jura/to where the goats delight to tread upon the brink/of meaning . . ." The journey is a self-delighting trek through the poet's own mental landscape, a place shaped by puns, unlikely juxtapositions, by the machinations of rhyme through which one sound can generate another and send the poem off in a different direction ("Haggadah/haggaday", "brink/skating-rink", "corridor/ordure", "card board-box/Ultravox"), playful re ferences to the poet's previous works (". . . the Khaliber six-pack,/ the stack of twenty copies of The Annals of Chile ($21 hardback)"). It's a purely verbal performance, a party-piece, a frothy dessert; but then every poem in the book seems to want to be a sorbet or a souffle or a scoop of ice-cream:
My heart is heavy. For I saw Fionnuala,
`The Gem of the Row', `The Flower of Sweet Strabane', when a girl reached down into a freezer-bin
to bring up my double-scoop of vanilla. ("White Shoulders")
"Sleeve Notes" is a a sequence of twenty-one poems provoked by the poet's record collection:
So it was I gave up the Oona for the Susquehanna,
the Shannon for the Shenandoah ("Bruce Springsteen: The River") or
You can take the man of Armagh but, you may ask yourself,
can you take the Armagh out of the man in the big Armani suit?
("Talking Heads: True Stories")
There's a series of ninety haiku about nothing very much: "A muddle of mice. /Their shit looks like caraway/but smells of all- spice." There are concrete poems which are pure visual jokes, individual lyrics and more extended poems which function by the yoking together of unlikely elements, the one functioning as an ironic subversion of the other - the Faerie Queen and a pint of Heineken, Averroes and spermicide. There are the quasi-confessional poems deflected into ironic distance by repetitive devices and a detached, invulnerable tone, such as "The Little Red Book" - "It was Aisling who first soft-talked my penis-tip between her legs/ while teasing open that Velcro strip between her legs . . . And whatever became of Sorcha, Sorcha, Sorcha? /Her weakness for the whip between her legs." or "They that Wash on Thursday" where every line ends in "hand". "Errata" turns the proof-reader's correction into a post-modern manual:
For `Antrim' read `Armagh'.
For `mother' read `other'.
For `harm' read `farm'.
For `feather' read `father'.
The final sequence is a cod vision-poem populated by Virgil, Aeneas, Creusa, the poet's father, and a meal in a restaurant off the Champs Elysees, a sort of "Station Island" on acid which takes up the device of the erratum slip to leave us stranded between "lass" and "less", "dinkum" and "dink" until, by the time we reach "For `Wooroonooran', my darlings, read `Wirra Wirra' ", we want to add, "for `ludic invention' read `too much already' ".
Each device, each tic or trick is given the fullest possible rein, as if Muldoon wants to see how far he can make the original impulse travel. The limits are well tested over the 140 pages of the book. The problem, though, with this kind of writing is that , in taking us so far, the poems don't really advance us very much; what is primarily articulated and celebrated here is the poet's own gift; the poems are all mirrors throwing back the slyly smiling face of the poet. There are fine poems here - the title poem , "The Hug" (for Joseph Brodsky), "Wire" - and plenty to enjoy along the way. But there is no poem as powerful or genuinely inventive as "In cantata" from The Annals of Chile. There's a sense of the poet flexing his muscles, biding his time, waiting for the next big notion to move into sight.