In a collection that spans a lifetime, Paul Muldoon’s selected works reveals the evolution of a poet who achieved multiple honors including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. While many poets lock themselves into a particular style or gradual, organic ascent, Muldoon is known for major shifts in approach between collections, spanning a deft if not eclectic combinations of technique and form. While thoroughly a modern poet, his work anchors in the past, covering family origin, landscape, language, and bygone eras of society and the mind. In the reading, it is clearly Muldoon throughout the years in his charm and understated wit that flies so low on the radar it could be missed, more likely absorbed in reflection.

This book is organized by metered selections from his published collections and presented in chronological order. This is key to understanding the poet. Never before could his readers so clearly mark the years of his life in presentation and content. From "Cuba"...

With the world at war, if not at an end.'
My father was pounding the breakfast-table.

to "The Sonogram"...

Only a few weeks ago the sonogram of Jean's womb
resembled nothing so much
as a satellite map of Ireland.

through the Pulitzer-prizewinning "Redknots"...

The day our son is due is the very day
the redknots are meant to touch down
on their long haul
from Chile to the Arctic Circle

and touching down for awhile in "A Hare at Aldergrove"...

A hare standing up at least on his own two feet
in the blasted grass by the runway may trace his lineage to the great
assembly of hares that, in the face of what might well have looked like defeat,
would, in 1963 or so, migrate
here from the abandoned airfield at Nutt's Corner, not long after Marilyn Monroe
overflowed from her body stocking
in Something's Got to Give...

and again as a way of final example in "Cuba (2)"...

The Riviera's pool is shaped like a coffin.
So much has been submerged since the Bay of Pigs.
Maybe that's why the buildings are wrinkled?
Maybe that's why the cars have fins?

...his prose changes from inward reflection to an outward understanding of the world, and its structure expands to semi-epic proportion.

At times, the poet is accused of archaic or confounding world selection. Sure enough his lines deliver necessary pause. In the noise of today's megalomaniacal output of information and predominantly tripe, we struggle to hear the authentic voices of our philosophers and poets. Muldoon asks us to slow down and hear the story. He is a generational poet of importance, at times reflecting the nonsensical thinking of our times, but he delivers significance with inspiring insight that comes upon you slowly in the way that you remember what is being said.

Kudos goes to the editor, who might be the poet himself, operating as a sort of curator for this retrospective. But let's not bury Muldoon just yet. I'm sure he's busy game-changing his prose in a new collection for the senses and thought.

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