Fran Brearton reviews Horse Latitudes by Paul Muldoon

Is this the book where Muldoon has finally ‘gone native’ in America? Horse Latitudes, his tenth collection, looks like an American wolf in Faber & Faber clothing, with its (FSG?) cover design of nose-to-tail horses doubtless shifting from foot to foot around the book, and its fortunate exemption from the rather too interesting blues, browns, greens, reds or yellows of other recent Faber productions. (The spelling in the book is American too.) The cover painting, by Stubbs, is entitled ‘Mares and Foals without a Background’, a caution, perhaps, for those who relentlessly try to bring Muldoon back home to Ulster. Of course, it’s equally tempting to see a free-floating, perpetual circling as the only stable place for a poet who seems as restless as his poems, only really at home within them. (Muldoon’s carbon hoofprints must be extensive.) Yet to fall ‘between two stones’ – be they ‘Armagh or Tyrone’ (‘The Outlier’), Ireland or America, one side of the street or the other – relies, in this book as in its predecessor, Moy Sand and Gravel, on the tension of a double anchoring that keeps the poet from freefall, from precipitation into a postmodern void whose ‘provisional’ qualities could themselves begin to look remarkably fixed. Never ‘without a background’ to his foreground, or a foreground to his background, it’s as if Muldoon habitually copes with having been born an only twin. The speaker in ‘Eggs’ pecks his way through a crack in present-day America back to ‘a freshly whitewashed / scullery in Cullenramer’ and into the ‘new-laid eggs’ of the past ‘from any one of which’, he writes, ‘I might yet poke / my little beak’. The ‘country toward which I’ve been rowing / for fifty years’, in ‘It Is What It Is’, is also that landscape of the past, ‘the fifty years I’ve spent trying to put it together’.

It’s now twenty years since Muldoon left ‘The Old Country’ (as one of the poems in this collection has it) for pastures new, and even more than that since an hallucinogenic stroll with Ciaran Carson through the green fields of home transformed his head into the ‘head of a horse’ with a ‘dirty-fair mane’. It was probably only a matter of time before horses, in one form or another, earned a place in a book title, given their ubiquity in Muldoon’s oeuvre – from Moy’s horse fairs to the Wild West – and unsurprisingly, the horse trail in this book has all the elusiveness we’ve come to expect from the poet. The ‘horse latitudes’, the blurb helpfully tells us, ‘designate an area north and south of the equator in which ships tend to be becalmed, in which stasis if not stagnation is the order of the day, and where sailors traditionally threw horses overboard to conserve food and water’. That’s one handy fact through which to ‘interpret’ this book, of which more anon. Another strategy might be to pick up various horsy links in a chain, to jog along an intertextual and self-referential ‘inside track’: there are ‘clay horses’, cobs, war horses, stallions, pack mules and asses. There’s a pair of ‘rain-bleached horses’ (compare ‘Gathering Mushrooms’) who stand ‘head to tail’ (compare ‘Why Brownlee Left’). There are moments of Frostian rhythmical canters: ‘whereof…whereof…whereof’; ‘whereat…whereat…whereat’. And horses become, inevitably, hobbyhorses – one of Muldoon’s being the urge to squeeze signification dry: so there’s a ‘half-assed attempt to untangle / the ghastly from the price of gasoline’; his former lover is put ‘through her paces’, although she kicks ‘against the traces’. Even more obliquely, the seemingly all-American poem, ‘Soccer Moms’, a double villanelle and paean to 1960s America, with ‘Gene Chandler…winning their hearts, Mavis and Merle’, borrows from Walter Scott’s ‘The Lady of the Lake’: ‘Merry it is in good greenwood / When the mavis and merle are singing…When the deer sweeps by and the hounds are in cry, / And the hunter’s horn is ringing.’ Even without a hoof in sight, it thereby earns itself a fugitive link to the hunting imagery elsewhere in the book.

This is all fun to do, and to read a Muldoon book is to learn lots of new things. Since he is technically brilliant – perhaps more so than any other poet of recent decades – there is, as always, a delight in stylistic accomplishment for its own sake. This is an outrageously virtuoso performance, a triumphant canter round the ring, According to Michael Ferber, (Dictionary of Literary Symbols), ‘in America many say…“Whoa!” who have never ridden a horse’. To my knowledge, Muldoon hasn’t ridden a horse either, but throughout Horse Latitudes, we’re reminded that he’s wielding, (witness the odd ‘whoah’, or ‘clippety-clop’), an ‘equestrienne’s whip’ with consummate skill. Muldoon is a poet who can pull the stylistic reins tight, loop them, or seemingly let them run free, who can keep ‘Four in Hand’, who won’t ‘lose a stirrup’ or ‘come a cropper’.

‘Part of writing’, Muldoon tells us, ‘is about manipulation – leaving [people] high and dry, in some corner at a terrible party, where I’ve nipped out through the bathroom window’. In a sense, what once looked ‘difficult’ in Muldoon, what left many readers ‘high and dry’, and what provided plenty of fodder for the academic, has been transformed by the internet. What might once have entailed weeks of research now requires little more than an afternoon with Google. The great virtue of that change is not the ease with which Muldoon is now ‘elucidated’; rather, we can now shortcut to a recognition that such elucidations and explications (through which the dedicated Muldoonian sleuth once held his or her own readers captive) don’t really help that much at all. Always alert to what critics are up to, Muldoon surely knows that changing technologies can change the way he is read. That being the case, we might do well to suspect that something underhand is afoot when the tricky Muldoon gives easy answers. ‘Riddle’, for instance, seems to parody the kind of academic pedantry that tried to ‘work out’ Muldoon (‘My first may be found…in grime / but not in rime’ etc). The answer – griddle – is only another version of ‘riddle’ anyway (a wire-bottomed sieve) which takes us once more round the hamster wheel and back to where we began. It is, in other words, an empty quest.

But there must be more to it than that, and perhaps this is a book about rather different kinds of ‘riddles’, one that proposes ‘riddles’ in as much as it confronts, and seeks to express, the difficult, or insoluble problem. That expression is embedded in the form and structure of the poems, as much as in the surface difficulty of what they say. Always drawn to repetition, Muldoon has taken it, surely, as far as it can formally and thematically go, notably in the sonnet-sequence ‘The Old Country’. Here, as elsewhere, Muldoon is fascinated by envelope patterns, enclosing the whole sequence with ‘every town was a tidy town’, and plaiting each poem into the next through one step forward, two steps back repetitions – a slow, slow quick movement that is to appear in reverse in the final poem of the book, ‘Sillyhow Stride’. In ‘The Old Country’, the final line of each sonnet is the first line of the next. This suggests repetition as a cumulative building of detail, as is the case in ‘The Outlier’, and as is familiar from Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’. But in ‘The Old Country’, Muldoon complicates the forward narrative since the repetitions double back on themselves. (If each repeated line were to be numbered, from 1 to 9, the pattern of repetition runs: 1223; 3224; 2445; 5446; 6776 and so on to conclude 9881.) The form captures the stagnation and insularity (‘Every track was an inside track / and every job an inside job’) of a society renowned for a certain ‘no surrender’ mentality: ‘Every point was a point of no return / for those who had signed the Covenant in blood’. To parody a mentality the poem simultaneously critiques is a risky strategy, since the poem might all too easily become its detractors. Yet Muldoon does carry it off – just – capturing both the sense of apocalypse (‘every ditch was a last ditch) and tedium (‘every boat was, again, a burned boat’) that leave the ‘old country’ (temptingly, though not necessarily, Northern Ireland) caught in the repetition of its own failed strategies. Like his peers, in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, Muldoon does not presume to offer a solution to the riddle, only to expose the conundrum through the play of form.

Horse Latitudes, for all its ‘play’, is therefore also a deeply political book. It is also, one senses at times, an angry book, whose forms are bound up with its sense of personal trauma and historical crisis. To go back to horses briefly: the superb ‘Medley for Morin Khur’ takes us seamlessly from the horse-headed Mongolian violin to a ‘body-strewn central square…in which they’ll heap the horses’ heads / by the heaps of horse skin’. Glaucus, in the poem of that title, is ‘eaten now by his own mares’. Yeats’s ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, (a poem quoted by Muldoon in ‘The Old Country’) with its ‘Violence upon the roads: violence of horses’ who, ‘wearied running round and round in their courses / All break and vanish’, lurks behind the scenes, as does Macbeth, in which Duncan’s horses – ‘beauteous and swift’ – devour each other. For all the circularity and repetition of this book, for all its repetitive running round its courses, it too is underpinned by what will ‘break and vanish’, by injustice and evil.

Horses thus begin to look rather like Swiftian rational beings, the victims of a bestial and violent human history on display in the sequence of 19 sonnets, ‘Horse Latitudes’, that opens the collection. The sonnets are all about battles beginning with ‘B’, some familiar (Bannockburn, Bosworth Field, Boyne, Bull Run), others less so (Bronkhorstspruit, Beersheba). The sequence is a version of the ‘horse latitudes’ writ large across human history. Taking us chronologically from the 12th to the 21st century, it encompasses the Wars of the Roses, the American War of Independence, the Boer War, the Great War, and so on. Yet at the same time it cannot move forward, always returning to the default ‘B’ setting, ‘stasis if not stagnation…the order of the day’. The more recent ‘War on Terror’, is evoked more than once, rendering Baghdad present through its absence: in ‘Blaye’, the 14th century French are ‘still struggling to prime / their weapons of mass destruction’; in ‘Blackwater Fort’, Bush will ‘come clean’ on the ‘gross / imports of crude oil…only when the Tigris comes clean’ – a sinister hint of purging there. The present stains the past as much as vice versa, just as ‘Carlotta’s’ cancer, another strand to the sequence, is a ‘tumor…on dark ground’, contaminating memory, denying a future. The attrition of this sequence thus sends depressing signals to the present, more particularly to Bush’s America: this is a history in which there are, quite evidently, no winners, however many battles are fought, whatever their names.

If the lesson learned, or more depressingly unlearned here, is that war is a no-win situation, it’s unsurprising that Muldoon allows himself, in Milton’s phrase, to ‘give the reins to grief’, in the elegy for Warren Zevon, ‘Sillyhow Stride’, at the end of book: ‘you knew the mesotheliomata // on both lungs meant the situation was lose-lose’. Whatever journeys through space and time have been going on in Horse Latitudes, it is always here, with the inevitability of repetition, that they have been taking us: as he puts it in ‘It Is What It Is’, ‘My mother. Shipping out for good. For good this time.’ The collection is haunted by cancer victims: his former lover, Mary Farl Powers, his mother Brigid, the musician Warren Zevon, and his sister Maureen Muldoon, in whose memory the book is dedicated. This is elegiac ground Muldoon has trodden before – in ‘Incantata’, and in ‘Yarrow’ – but here something sounds different. One of the repeated motifs of ‘Sillyhow Stride’ is ‘yeah right’ (‘to enter in these bonds / is to be free, yeah right’). This is a more cynical music than the ‘all would be swept away’ of ‘Yarrow’, and in writing of his sister’s death, Muldoon, far from nipping out of the bathroom window, is extraordinarily present in the poem:

I knelt beside my sister’s bed, Warren, the valleys and the peaks
of the EKGs, the crepusculine X-rays,
the out-of-date blisterpacks

discarded by those child soldiers from the Ivory Coast or Zaire,
and couldn’t think that she had sunk so low
she might not make the anniversary

of our mother’s death from this same cancer, this same quick, quick, slow
conversion of manna to gall
from which she died thirty years ago. I knelt and adjusted the sillyhow

of her oxygen mask, its vinyl caul
unlikely now to save Maureen from drowning in her own spit.
I thought of how the wrangling schools

need look no further than her bed
to find what fire shall burn this world…

If metre, rhyme and diction instantly identify such lines as Muldoon’s, the voice is perhaps tonally less familiar: angry, bitter, even helpless in the face of the ‘quick, quick, slow’, ‘lose lose’ dance unto death (a movement that the book itself structurally performs) not merely of his loved ones, but of society as a whole. Horse Latitudes is, as we would expect, a brilliant performance; it also offers an unusually direct insight into some of the passions with which this supposedly detached and manipulative poet burns.

 

Horse Latitudes (Faber, 2006, ISBN: 978-0-571-23234-5, £14.99)

 

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