THE STATE OF POETRY
SELECTED POEMS. By Tony Harrison.
Random House.
$15.95.
WAR MUSIC: AN ACCOUNT OF BOOKS 16-19 OF HOMER'S
ILLIAD. By Christopher Logue.
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux.
$12.95.
SELECTED POEMS 1968-1986. By Paul Muldoon.
Ecco Press.
$19.50.
"Where there is amenability to paraphrase," wrote Osip
Mandelstam, "there the sheets have not been rumpled-there poetry
has not spent the night." The poet was championing a particular
kind of language-originated lyricism. The ear, believed Mandel–
starn, would infallibly lead the pen away from abstraction , from
ideas. He would have delighted in following the evolution of the
young Northern Irish poet, Paul Muldoon: his every developmental
stage is marked by poems more accurately and more adventurously
listened
onto the page .
The earliest work gathered in Muldoon's
Selected Poems
1968-1986
is the most conventional. Deft anecdotal sketches follow
the off-kilter ripple and roll of a situation or build upon the telling ir–
regularity of some vernacular utterance. Already, though, the spe–
cial gift is evident. There is an eccentric precision to the narrative
strokes, a willful obliquity that transforms the commonplace, and a
clear fondness for the sounds of words:
Old photographs would have her bookish, sitting
Under a willow. I take that to be a croquet-
Lawn. She reads aloud, no doubt from Rupert Brooke.
The month is always Mayor June.
Or with any stranger on the motor-bike.
Not my father , no. This one's all crew-cut
And polished brass buttons.
An American soldier, perhaps.
And the full moon
Swaying over Keenaghan, the orchards and the cannery ,
Thins to a last yellow-hammer, and goes.
The neighbors gather, all Keenaghan and Collegelands ,
There is story-telling. Old miners at Coalisland
Going into the ground. Swinging, for fear of the gas ,
The soft flame of a canary.
-"Ma"
But these are just the first evolutionary stirrings. In the poems
that follow, from the books
VVlry
Brownlee Left
and
QUOD],
the
,
