Review by Booklist Review
Prolific, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet with more than 30 books to his credit and poetry editor at the New Yorker for a decade, Muldoon reinvigorates the craft in his new, punching collection. Traversing both time and topography, these poems frisk through contrasting sensations, especially in two perplexing, mirroring poems, ""Pablo Picasso: Bottle of Bass and Glass (1914)"" and ""Georges Braque: Still Life with Bottle of Bass (1914),"" which is essentially a cubist poem in two parts. In the brief ""The Door,"" the tangible hints at the intangible: Though it beggars belief / there's something more / than this realm / of smoke. Longer lyrics, such as ""Belfast Hymn"" and ""Hunting with Eagles, Western Mongolia, 2016,"" celebrate our sensuous intimacy within the natural world. With a tour guide's knowledge and engagement, Muldoon circumnavigates historical follies and whims from the Great War to our current political circus in ""Position Paper,"" a humorous romp improvising on familiar aphorisms: When in Rome, spare the rod / and spoil the whole barrel. It's all grist / to those mills of God. This is a strong, agile collection from one of the world's finest poets at his best.--Raúl Niño Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The imaginative 13th book from Muldoon (One Thousand Things Worth Knowing) features plenty of his signature techniques for fans, though few innovations. Celebrated for his dense, imaginative allusions, Muldoon fills his poems with a cast from antiquity to the present. The poems follow a loose temporal conceit, moving toward more explicitly contemporary settings, though an interest in poetic associations and leaps trouble any straightforward sense of time. For instance, in "With Eilmer of Malmesbury," the 11th-century Benedictine monk is the counterpoint to the death of a friend's child. Other poems on mortality, including a number of dedication poems for artists still living or who have recently died--John Ashbery, Leonard Cohen, and Bruce Springsteen among them--provoke some of the book's most breathtaking writing, such as a couplet describing death as "that unthinkable world where a wasp may recognize another wasp's face/ and an elephant grieve for an elephant down at the watering place." While not all the poems reach those heights, Muldoon's longtime readers will be pleased with this latest addition to his oeuvre. (Nov.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Mostly formal verse, the poems in Pulitzer Prize winner Muldoon's latest collection offer variations of the sonnet, sestina, and villanelle as they revel in playful homophones, technical virtuosity, and twisted clichés. "A Rooster in Tepoztlán," one of the final poems, illustrates Muldoon's technique and is also one of the best. According to Muldoon, it was inspired by his experience teaching at Under the Volcano, a writing program in the Mexican town of Tepoztlán, known as the birthplace of Quetzalcoatl. Set in early morning just before Lauds, the poem shows "the street-dog choristers" losing out to a single rooster. The poem, written in seven parts and including four tercets per section, is packed with details as Muldoon notes the din of life outside his window. He also muses, as in other poems here, on the present chaotic state of the world as well as his own Irish past. VERDICT As one might expect, these poems are replete with numerous allusions to Catholicism--none of which captures or even suggests its spiritual roots. Instead, they progress collagelike through a dizzying and sometimes witty display of free association, rhyme, half-rhyme, puns, and allusions. For academic libraries only.--C. Diane Scharper, Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
