Of "Plan B," which included several of the poems in "Maggot,"
Robert McCrum recently said in the London "Observer "that "Paul
Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet's task, has
surpassed himself with his latest collection." In his eleventh
full-length book, Muldoon reminds us that he is a traditional poet
who is steadfastly at odds with tradition. If the poetic sequence
is the main mode of "Maggot," it certainly isn't your father's
poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W. B. Yeats's remark
that the only fit topics for a serious mood are "sex and the dead,"
Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it
means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It's no
accident that the centerpiece of "Maggot "is an outlandish
meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of
entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics,
meanwhile, takes as its subject the urge to memorialize the scenes
of fatal automobile accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and
the erotic is at the heart of not only the title sequence but also
many of the round songs that characterize "Maggot," and has led
Angela Leighton, writing in "The Times Literary Supplement," to see
these new poems as giving readers "a thrilling, wild, fairground
ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish."
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