Jefferson Holdridge, The Poetry of Paul Muldoon.

Homem, Rui Carvalho

Jefferson Holdridge, The Poetry of Paul Muidoon. Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2008. 224 pages. EUR 16.95.

Spanning more than four decades and including eleven major collections plus several 'interim publications' in various genres and forms, the oeuvre of Paul Muldoon to date, in its volume and consistency, amply justifies the amount of critical discussion that it has generated on both sides of the Atlantic, materialised in countless articles and a few book-length studies. True, one might expect such consistent attention to have yielded a few thematically streamlined monographs by now; but the fact that books on Muldoon so far have tended to be overviews (as shown by titles that simply borrow the poet's name) may reflect the particularly demanding nature of his writing.

The challenges posed by Muldoon's work are at all stages acknowledged and critically confronted by Jefferson Holdridge in the latest of the book-length studies dedicated to this poet. The book's panoramic design is revealed in its title, The Poetry of Paul Muldoon; but Holdridge, while remaining true to his project for a reader- and student-friendly overview, also manages to include detailed readings of a few poems from different stages in Muldoon's career, and to offer probing insights into defining traits of his poetics. Holdridge is insistently modest in his description of the book as providing 'an introductory critical perspective', which aims 'to introduce the general reader to some of the main critical questions surrounding Muldoon's work as well as to introduce his general themes, major poems and concerns'. Additionally, the student audiences he certainly has in mind may be attracted by the book's commitment, declared in its opening pages, to showing 'how vital a role the American context and aesthetic plays in understanding Muldoon's poetry'. The book is signposted by reminders of its pedagogic designs: for example, an acknowledgement that the poet's inaugural collection 'was criticised for not having an organising principle' is duly followed by emphasis on that collection's thematic patterns ('Here is a list of ...'). This concern with clarification is adequately served by Holdridge's decision to organise the volume in chapters that follow the chronological sequence of Muldoon's major collections, one collection per chapter. The Poetry of Paul Muldoon, however, is more than a reader's guide: while ostensibly aiming at providing easier access to a notoriously complex poet, by highlighting chronology and pattern and allowing for a fairly self-contained consideration of individual books, Holdridge nonetheless manages to offer a critical narrative of the course of Muldoon's writing that straddles the various chapters. Thus, he emphasises both formal and representational continuities that have become trademark features of Muldoon's poetry, and concerns that have consistently been foregrounded in critical assessments of this poet.

One such concern (arguably the broadest?) involves the nature of the postmodernism of which Muldoon has for so long been hailed as a key poetic exemplar. Holdridge teases out the challenges that Muldoon's own writing poses to such a critical label: at its simplest, this affords a recognition that "his poetic is postmodem, his sense of form is traditional'. But the issue, as Holdridge in fact shows, is more complex than such a neat formula might suggest: the book includes demonstrations of Muldoon's fascination for 'the closed postmodern aesthetic', but it also highlights that such fascination is often of the kind that can only eventuate in parody. This is a dimension of Muldoon's poetics that has resisted critical stabilisation, largely because of the contradictory signs provided by his output. The characteristic Muldoon poem boasts its ostensible offhandedness and indeterminacy--but, when probed in its underpinnings, is found to have been fastidiously crafted (as proved by studies of the poet's papers, kept at Emory University). Concurrently, Muldoon's criticism ranges from a celebration of 'conglomewriting', the name he coined for a writerly practice defined by compulsive citation and by hybridity in form and reference, to an insistence on authorial control and a belated New Critical stringency as regards form. Indeed, in a 1998 lecture that Holdridge cites more than once Muldoon defiantly endorsed 'the autonomy of the text' and a totalising claim on behalf of 'the poet's job', defined as 'to take into account, as best he or she is able, all possible readings of the poem', despite the extent to which such notions '[fly] in the face of much contemporary criticism'. However, the obsessive exercises in close reading that defined most of his Oxford lectures (collected in The End of the Poem, 2006) would seem less intent on totalisation and self-containment than on deconstructive deferral, as the poet qua reader browses through a number of 'possible readings of the poem', often without seeming to privilege one over the others. Elsewhere, Muldoon may seem intent on squaring the circle when he describes the Irish tradition as grounded in an 'essential liminality' (an oxymoron that seems designed to epitomise these uncertainties in his poetics).

Holdridge returns to the modernism/postmodernism conundrum at several points in the book, taking the reader deftly through some of its implications by drawing on poems from different moments in Muldoon's oeuvre. He notes the close relations between some of the vagaries in Muldoon's poetics, the theme of authorship and authority, and the range of predecessors to which the poet is indebted (a topic for which the position of Yeats and Joyce as alternative father figures in the modern Irish tradition is anything but irrelevant). And, despite the much-emphasised introductory nature of his book, Holdridge is critically assertive on this crucial topic: Muldoon 'is eclectic and playfully baroque in style, but ... when it comes to his central philosophy of the illumination of the subject, and its place in the world, he is beholden to the modernists for his poetic.... he celebrates relativism only to a point, and not to a point of no return'.

This argument about the extent of Muldoon's 'relativism' is closely related to another object of Holdridge's critical redress: the lingering notion (of which Helen Vendler was the most famous proponent) that Muldoon's poetry displays an absence of 'feeling'. Holdridge leaves his readers in no doubt that, despite the bleakness of Muldoon's vision and the sceptical light in which he considers human affairs, pathos is a core element of his writing, and an alertness to 'human suffering' (in all its 'messiness') pervades his referential range. This concern is thus seen to define both Muldoon's relation to tradition--it underlies Holdridge's argument on his indebtedness to Swiftian satire, energised by indignation--and to all the recurrent public and private objects of Muldoon's poetic attention. Indeed, the poet's range includes the iniquities of history (Irish or otherwise) as much as the oppressions of family experience; the distinct challenges posed by the pieties of place and the uncanniness of displacement; the excitement but also the element of trauma in sexuality; the fascination and revulsion of human predatoriness. Holdridge's emphasis on the persistence of suffering in Muldoon's writing finds a focus in the elegiac writing that loomed so large in The Annals of Chile (1994), through the long poem 'Incantata' and the vast sequence 'Yarrow'; and it culminates in his reading of the collection discussed in the book's final chapter, Horse Latitudes (2006). This volume is dominated by homologies between deformity in the human body (through cancer) and dysfunctions in the body politic (epiton-used by the second Iraq war, suggested through poems entitled after a succession of battles from different periods in history, on a variety of locations around the world). In fact, Holdridge's claim that, in Muldoon, poetry is often 'an expression of [a] scar', or of a pathology that becomes troped and interrogated at both a biological and broadly political level can be found to include an element of critical prescience since this characterisation of the ethics and poetics of late Muldoon is fully confirmed by his recent Maggot (2010). This collection is already beyond the chronological range of Holdridge's study, but it is possibly Muldoon's most obsessive inquiry to date into wayward biology and existence, and those distressed morphologies in flesh, polity, and language that Holdridge highlights with regard to earlier volumes.

There are moments in this book when readers may wonder whether Holdridge is not over-enhancing the factors of coherence and consequence in the poet's oeuvre, as when (again within the scope of the modernist/postmodernist dilemma mentioned above) he discusses the extent to which Muldoon's poetry may be energised by a 'rage for order', even a consideration of literature's 'redemptive capacity'. This involves, in some measure, reading Muldoon against himself--he has explicitly declared his antipathy to the notion of poetry as 'solace' or 'succour'--which should raise no eyebrows (all the more so in light of the poet's often mischievous contradictions). And yet this might seem to sit ill at ease with Holdridge's apparent concern, elsewhere, with offering something like an authorised critical study, as suggested by his decision to replicate in the contents of his book the poet's wishes regarding the contours of his own canon: this form of critical reverence underlies a note explaining that Muldoon's short collection The Prince of the Quotidian (1994) has been excluded from consideration 'because Muldoon chose not to include it' in Poems 1968-1998, and Holdridge has 'taken his editorial decision as definitive'. Other aspects that may do less than justice to Holdridge's usual critical acumen include his 'Conclusion', which (again possibly reflecting his overriding concern with making the book accessible to students and non-specialised readers) offers little more than a synopsis of the previous chapters rather than a critical synthesis of the book's more inspiring reflections. These are, however, minor liabilities in a study that will no doubt prove indispensable to those wishing to acquaint themselves with Muldoon's poetry, and which (more broadly) will bring many useful insights to readers of contemporary (not exclusively Irish) poetry.

RUI CARVALHO HOMEM

Universidade do Porto