Joy in service on Rue Tagore

Muldoon's first collection, New Weather, appeared in 1968, and he has been his own weather system almost ever since, visible all along the horizon of contemporary poetry in English. Like the recent solar storm, he's thrown bands of Technicolor into parts of the world that rarely if ever see such displays. He has charged and changed the language and the forms of poetry. Open his latest collection anywhere and find yourself in a vast elsewhere. Words are savored, complicated; the wonders of etymology never cease. As in the ekphrastic sonnet, "Winslow Homer: The Veteran in a New Field," "Some blisters never grow calluses / just as some townsfolk never grasp the argot // of a scythe's 'tang' and 'snaith.'" From line to line and stanza to stanza, Muldoon surprises and unsettles readers. Time, situation, language--everything is blended, found to be related, or forced into new relations, given the treatment a taffy-twister gives to taffy. It is mesmerizing to watch, to hear, and to contemplate.

In this expansive outing, Muldoon (Howdie Skelp) displays a certain ruefulness, despite being in full command of "that much-vaunted consistency of tone" (as one of the poems puts it) readers have come to associate with him. Muldoon draws connections between unlikely sources, which lends his work a rambunctious, metaphysical undertone. But there's an overtly political edge to many of the entries here, blending periods and layering symbols to tackle contemporary and historical disaster and subtly explore "the appetite for killing without qualm." "So much else has vanished/ from our lives," Muldoon writes, hitting a lightly apocalyptic note. Odessa becomes twinned with Ross's Mill in Muldoon's native Ulster, and there are warnings for despots, from "a body hanging upside down by a hook/ like a goat hanging in a souk" to a prediction for Putin: "His poker-face and his death-mask/ will be one and the same." Muldoon continues his propensity for the longer poem in sequence and the chiming, lexical harmonies with which he makes symphonies. Lyrical, forthright, and playfully sophisticated, these are poems with a bounce to their step and a finger on history's pulse. (Sept.)