Corrupt to Maggots
A collage of bones, greasy feathers and florescent debris recreates the form of a dead bird on the cover of Muldoon's rich and grim new book of poems, Maggot. It's a substantial collection, which draws together the Sylph pamphlet When the Pie Was Opened (2008), and the "interim" volume and collaboration with photographer Norman McBeath, Plan B (2009). Such a disparate production history doesn't injure the coherence of Maggot. The book is also efficiently seasonal, recalling childhood Christmases and decorated by flights of geese, reindeer and the gifts of the Magi.
We are no doubt being tacitly invited to believe that "Magi" and "Maggot" share an etymological root; this volume exhibits Muldoon's continued fascination with curious lexical relationships. "Maggot" is variously applied, and in the poem of that name—a sequence of 14-liners—"whim" is the connecting rhyme word. This rarer definition is as important to the volume as the entomological. The circumspect detective of Why Brownlee Left (the 1980 collection which opened with a poem called "Whim") branches into amateur forensic entomology ('Who knew 'forensic' derived from forum...'), in "Yup", and one of Maggot's stand-out long poems, "The Humors of Hakone". In that sequence, "maggot" functions as a meta-poetic ambiguity, containing as it does the sense of the birth—or imaginative conception—of the poem, as well as its de-composition. Which here could also be a form of critical de-construction, as the speaker regrets it is 'Too late to insist that the body of a poem is no less sacred / than a temple with its banner gash / though both stink to high heaven.'
Double entendre amusement trumps philology in one of Maggot's more gratuitous offerings, "Balls", which pretends to mourn  

                        the loss of a sense of the Latin root and stem
                        that would help us weigh in on which came first—be it testis as 'witness'
                        or testis as the 'ball' on which the oath is sworn

as it delightedly links euphemisms for testicles and mendacity ('I listened to the gobblers / while they shook their wattles / and talked a load of old cobblers[.]')
The frequency of casual sexual references in this volume is a return—perhaps unwelcome—to an earlier Muldoon. There are many warmer familiarities. "When the Pie was Opened" corresponds with a now established mode of Muldoonian elegy. Cancer has become an all-too-familiar aggressor in his poetry, and in Maggot we are told that 'melanoma has relaunched its campaign / in a friend I once dated.' "When the Pie was Opened" begins with fleshed swords and fighting talk, in the company of Hector, Ajax, Ferdia and Cuchulainn. In the fullness of the poem this is tempered by a witty poignancy, recalling the helplessly tautological image at the end of "Incantata", Muldoon's elegy to his former lover, Mary Farl Powers ('that you might reach out, arrah / and take in your ink-stained hands my own hands stained with ink.'):

                             That your olive-drab body in a shirt
                             of olive-drab
                             would be sufficient, after your radiotherapy,
                             to trigger a dirty bomb alert

                             At Canal and Mulberry sets the stage
                             for another twinge at the gauge
                             on my own instrument bank.

Strains of Yeatsian whimsy can also be heard—'Would that the world were indeed to be broken out/ of its crust like a hedgehog baked in clay'.
The long poem delivered the ending flourish to Muldoon's earlier collections, and it has become increasingly integral to his poetics. Horse Latitudes (2006) contained four long sequence poems; Maggot is punctuated by six. In returning to this mode, Muldoon does not, thankfully, remain fixated on its more banal temptations. A self-replicating aesthetic, long in development, was heard insistently in Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) and Horse Latitudes. "As" from the earlier volume listed a series of increasingly inconsequential successions ('As transhumance gives way to trance / and shaman gives way to Santa [...] and Calvin gives way to Calvin Klein [...] I give way to you'), and "The Old Country", from the later collection, followed a dense, repetitious pattern of inward turns ('Every time was time in the nick / just as every nick was a nick in time'). Critics have found in Muldoon the 'self-inwoven' simile which Empson identified in Shelley—a formula where, analogies not coming quickly enough to the poet's excited imagination, he 'compares the thing to a vaguer or more abstract notion of itself, or points out that it is its own nature'; this has seemed in danger, in Muldoon's more recent work, of being overtaken by something more tiredly self-regarding.
It has been noted that in Muldoon's elegy for his mother, "Yarrow", a preoccupation with the cancerous bears upon the poem's formal complexities, its numerical patterns, replications and reproductions. "When the Pie was Opened" accords to a basic, more traditional formula, in which the last line of a poem compels the first of the next in sequence. It seems to catch itself in the neat simplicity of its formal game when, at the end of the fifth fragment, our subject is found 'enmeshed in a snare'. Whilst the poem's ending effects a circular return, the snare ('through which I myself might squeeze / on my hands and knees [...] in which we find ourselves enmeshed') is the sticky groove in which we remain.
There is plenty of exhilaratingly new material in Maggot. "The Watercooler" is a syncopated, seven-line version of a sestina reflecting upon an office Christmas party. There is one consistent rhyme word, which chimes with a transforming other in each stanza, and one strand of corresponding syllables and assonance. Rhyming pairs ("watercooler" and "carpooler") stage a two-stanza residence, overlap with a succeeding pair, and then retire. There seems to be an attendant, thematic imperative for each of the seven stanzas to contain sleaze, flora and fauna—an imperative which holds for much of the wider volume.
Muldoon signals new imaginative territory in "The Side Project", where the nefarious, dizzyingly mobile space of the nineteenth-century American circus responds to the Coney Island amusement park of the opening poem "Plan B". Fran Brearton recognised, in a Tower Poetry review of Horse Latitudes, that the experience of reading Muldoon has changed in the Internet age. And just as the onus on the critic has lightened, so the careful research of a volume such as Meeting the British (1987), or the opaque allusion of Madoc (1990) is demystified, and replaced, in some of Maggot's long poems, by a visible Wikipedia trail. Yet while the feat of gathering and connecting historical personages such as the Union General William Sherman and the circus manager and entrepreneur Adam Forepaugh might now seem hollow, "The Side Project" manages to perform an imaginative and contextual triumph. The poem is broadly a love letter written from one circus artiste, named Frog Boy, to another, Human Chimera—a pair who have broken free of the main troupe during American Reconstruction. The idiom is satisfyingly pitched to the circus truism ('No Human Skeleton or Bearded Lady will primp / less for a small show than a great'), and "The Side Project" is a tale of infidelity (casually insinuated in the title), betrayal and greed, set in couplets of oblique, consonantal rhyme, which over 10 compelling pages, extends to biblical proportions. A curious Catholic sub-plot starring the longest serving pope, Pius IX (whose Syllabus Errorum appeared in 1864—the same year as the Battle of Atlanta), brims close to the surface. Muldoon rekindles the intrigue surrounding Pius's involvement in the American Civil War, and his rumoured (unverified) endorsement of the "Confederate States of America". The language of the poem, hovering between piety and play, seems to be gesturing at an extant paradox of American society; Frog Boy's declared impulse to 'give anything a try' accommodates 'both sudatory / and Psalter'.
The current profile picture on Muldoon's official website shows the poet felicitously squeezed between the President and Michelle Obama; it has become traditional for each of Muldoon's collections since his removal to the US in 1987 to be declared more "naturalised" than the last. Mindful of the repetition, I would maintain that Maggot is more completely and comfortably embedded in America, its history, society and culture, than previous volumes. Two dedications—a sonnet for Richard Wilbur and a sestina for John Ashbery—are perhaps overdue acknowledgment of Muldoon's company in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. And in the last, "Capriccio in E minor for Blowfly and Strings", a likeness is revealed between a Muldoonian wit, idiom and range of reference, and some of Ashbery's deadpan performances, such as "Daffy Duck in Hollywood".
"Capriccio in E minor for Blowfly and Strings" notices, with a look at a 'flaying' Jonathan Swift, who used 'a lyric ode' to 'slate' John Vanbrugh's town house, that 'all youthful rebels tire / of their youthful spirits'. And, as 'satire' is linked to 'tire' and 'retire' in this sestina, we realise that behind the energy and dynamism of this volume is a note of belatedness, and a fear of expiration, from a poet in his 60th year. "The Humors of Hakone" continually misses the substance of its investigation, built upon the anaphoric strain 'Too late...' Each poem in the "Maggot" sequence advances from a nostalgic past imperfect: 'I used to wait for another ambuscade / with only my hotwire shim. / Now I'm no less a blade / than Pistol, Bardolph or Nym.' And the action of "The Side Project", already a far historical reach, is surveyed from a distance of four decades. A repeated refrain in the Swift poem alluded to in Muldoon's sestina brings us back to the volume's title, as 'animals of largest size / Corrupt to maggots, worms, and flies'. Yet "Capriccio" also brings us back to "whim", and Maggot persuades us that whimsy is not an exclusively youthful occupation. That the maggots of fancy in this volume are replicating far beyond the maggots of decay is an encouraging portent.

Paul Muldoon, Maggot, Faber and Faber, 2010. £14.99 ISBN 978-0-571273-51-5

© Sarah Bennett, 2011
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