In 2003, Irish poet Paul Muldoon won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection Moy Sand and Gravel. Moy? It means gentle or mild. Muldoon's poetry is replete with words many readers will not know. It's part of his style. The 35 poems in his 12th collection, One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, add to the growing list: lapstrake, groop, refulgent, plenilunar, comal, byre.
Arcane words aside, his poems have panache, a touch of wit and playfulness. They're often allusive and opaque (some might call this artifice). In "Cuba (2)," a poem about a visit Muldoon and his daughter made to Havana, he writes: "The best poems, meanwhile, give the answers/ to questions only they have raised." Enigmatic indeed. Muldoon asks for some effort, and readers are richly rewarded.
The long opening poem, "Cuthbert and the Otters," is dedicated to the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, Muldoon's close friend. Like many Muldoon poems, it seems to be about one thing, but as a reader delves deeper, it's about so much more than, in this case, "the hope of staving off our pangs of grief": Muldoon "cannot thole [bear, endure] the thought of Seamus Heaney dead," so he wraps his grief within a tale of Cuthbert, a seventh-century Celtic monk.
Some of these poems are about artwork. Rita Duffy's painting Watchtower 2 is used on the book's cover and also inspires a poem within. Another longish work, "Charles Émile Jacque: Poultry Among Trees," provides the title to this book: as Muldoon tries to build a coop at his New Jersey home with the aid of Poultry Keeping for Dummies, he reflects upon his father's reliance on the practical handbook One Thousand Things Worth Knowing for his own dealings with chickens. One poem "Recalculating," is completely built upon analogies: "Tea is to leaf as journalist is to source./ Source is to leak as Ireland is to debt."
Other works explore dodgems, catamarans and the Civil War. One poem about avoiding pitfalls leads to Lewis and Clark, "quicksilver-scoots" and "mercury/ in our scats." The last piece--another long one, "Dirty Data"--morphs Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur with Irish history and Bloody Sunday. Given the breadth of topics and the remarkable vocabulary, readers who exit One Thousand Things Worth Knowing will be much smarter and wiser than they were when they entered. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher
Shelf Talker: Irish poet Paul Muldoon's new collection offers more poems that exhibit his patented humor, sharp wit and verbal virtuosity.