From Publishers Weekly
This first full volume since Muldoon's monumental Poems 1968-1998 reveals one of the English-speaking world's most acclaimed poets still at the top of his slippery, virtuosic game. Born in Northern Ireland, for more than a decade Muldoon has lived, taught and raised a family in Princeton, N.J. Hay (1998) showed Muldoon incorporating his wife's Jewish-American heritage, and his life as a father, into a poetics previously noted for its formal complexity, its shaggy-dog-story narratives, and its interest in Irish history. This substantial collection furthers Hay's subjects. It succeeds with fast-paced poems of suburban observation and whimsical memory in difficult forms: some inherited (terza rima, sestina, tercets, haiku, catechism, Yeats's "Prayer for My Daughter" stanza), others invented (a sonnet, each of whose first 12 lines ends in "draw"). Occasional poems return to the Irish Troubles Muldoon has long, off and on, described: "A Brief Discourse on Decommissioning" explains "you can't make bricks without the straw that breaks the camel's back." The book's most serious poems ground themselves instead in Muldoon's household. "The Stoic" meditates on a miscarriage "our child already lost from view before it had quite come into range," while the long closing poem places Muldoon's young son Asher in a context that combines Irish and Jewish history with Victorian wilderness stories, lines cribbed from Yeats, and Muldoon's own comic postures: "I, the so-called Goy from the Moy." A few of Muldoon's translations (Horace, Caedmon, Montale) seem slight, and several poems rely, perhaps too heavily, on allusions to Muldoon's own previous work; take those out, though, and what remains is a complicated network of verse declarations, stunts and depictions that may be fun for, and turn out to describe, a whole family.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Following on the heels of Poems 1968-1998, Muldoon's latest volume exhibits a tantalizing mix of dichotomies. The language of rural Ireland (where he was raised) cohabits with that of a professor at both Princeton and Oxford. First, consider "moy" in the title: the OED defines it as an adjective meaning "mild, gentle; demure; also, affected in manners, prim" or as a noun, meaning a "measure for salt; bushel." And all the words that follow are chosen with equal care for heightened ambiguity. Munificence is juxtaposed with munitions, while aunts is rhymed with taunts and fuss with orthodox, almost daring readers to roll and twist the words in their mouths. The poet convincingly joins such disparate elements as guns and butter in these narratives, using unfamiliar imagery and missing pieces, reminiscent of John Ashbery's poetry. Even when he's writing about the familiar, as in his masterly love poem "As," he alerts readers to new ways of seeing the world around them. The use of traditional forms might well make this book accessible to those not accustomed to reading poetry. An important purchase for all libraries. Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
