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018
Hammer, Langdon.
“Gamesmanship.” Rev. of Horse Latitudes and The End of the Poem
by Paul Muldoon. New York Times Book Review 18 February 2007:
24.
Although Paul Muldoon won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for his last collection of
poems. Moy Sand and Gravel, and though he served from 1999-2004 as
professor of poetry at Oxford University, many readers wonder if he is really a
serious poet: his "poetry is too full of games, too obscure, too clever,"
according to Langdon Hammer. Muldoon approaches serious subjects that
evoke anger, nostalgia, and grief, but he does so with verbal play. As
poet-speaker he writes of comic book characters in rhymes that "veer up and down
the scale of diction from toot/freeboot to murk/hauberk."
The second book Hammer is reviewing, The End of the Poem, is a collection
of the lectures he delivered at Oxford on seventeen poems he choose to say "what
he want[ed] to about poems that fascinate him." Among poems he feels have
been overlooked is Robert Frost's "The Mountain" and Elizabeth Bishop's "12
O'clock News." Muldoon takes these favorite poems apart finding in each a
web of intertextual connections that lead in multiple directions. However,
he is concerned mostly with how these poems came into being. His
discussion of Emily Dickinson's "I Tried to Think a Lonelier Thing" is "a
special tour de force," Hammer declares. Muldoon "broods" on several
images, at last finding the poem to be Dickinson's search for God and for a
reader. All of such discussions in this book make Hammer say, "Muldoon is
undoubtedly writing about his own motives for writing." Muldoon's
technical performance in Horse Latitudes demonstrate how he hides his
motives for writing by capturing the reader's interest through his mastery of
varied forms: a sestina, a pantoum, 23 pages of rhymed haiku, a poem of 100
lines of quatrains that is only one sentence, several song forms with refrains,
and the title poem which is made of 19 sonnets. Hammer's conclusion about
Muldoon is that he is indeed a serious poet, but one that readers will continue
to questions just as they question the art of Jonathan Swift and James Joyce.
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