The Riddle of the Expunged Words : THE ANNALS OF CHILE, <i> By Paul Muldoon (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $21; 189 pp.)</i> : THE PRINCE OF THE QUOTIDIAN, <i> By Paul Muldoon (Wake Forest University Press: $5.99; 40 pp.)</i>

In 1794, the English poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge planned to (but did not) come to America, meaning to set up a Pantisocracy, an equal rule for all, on the banks of the Susquehanna River. Paul Muldoon, an Irish poet who teaches at Princeton, nearly 200 years afterward, imagined what it would have been like if they had come West, and wrote a funny, tragic history of Western philosophy he called “Madoc, A Mystery” (1991).

In 1954, Ross Macdonald, who wrote his brooding, father-quest mysteries in Santa Barbara, said: “My fellow admirers of Coleridge will perhaps forgive me for suggesting that ‘Christabel’ is an unfinished mystery novel in verse, whose subject is the elucidation of guilt and the ritual exorcism--a guilt which arises from man’s ability to sin against himself, both consciously and unconsciously.”

Making such a triangulation is good practice for reading Paul Muldoon’s profound new poems, “The Annals of Chile.” Muldoon, “this picaro of the information highway,” is called “one of the most metaphoric poets alive.” “Paul’s changing the rules of the game,” Seamus Heaney is said to have said.

Or, he’s playing the poets’ oldest game, but makes it new. As Robert Graves knew, “poetry is rooted in love, and love in desire, and desire in the hope of continued existence.” In that human loam are planted Muldoon’s ancient roots. He was a young man in the Sixties. His poems travel back through the sex, drugs and rock and roll (Clapton and Hendrix) of that age; but deep through them also flow themes, and figures, of Irish legends: love, the ecclesiastical frustration of its desire, the poet’s circuit (a seasonal/eternal going away and coming back), the death of a lover or a mother, the poet’s desire (and failure--and so his grief) to restore life.

What are “the annals of Chile”? They are a riddle, and point to the mystery-riddle inside the poems. The poet calls up O’Higgins, (presumably, Bernardo, the liberator of Chile in the early 19th Century):

“There is inherent vice

in everything,” as O’Higgins

would proclaim: it was O’Higgins who duly

had the terms “widdershins”

and “deasil” expunged from the annals of Chile.

Here is the mystery: these “expunged” words. Only by moving with him through the poems will we comprehend how their meaning may be uncovered.

“Yarrow,” the book’s most complex poem, is a vision-poem of atonement. Knowledge of disaster and loss suffuses it: “all of us would be swept away.” As though watching a video, the poet reels back through memory and buried knowledge. His mother appears: she “thumbs through a seed-catalogue/she’s borrowed from Tohill’s of the Moy.” His father “studies the grain in the shaft of a rake.”

These images carry pain. For balm, he chews on yarrow, used by the Chinese for divination, and by medieval monks for healing medicines, and by Achilles to stanch the bleeding wounds of his soldiers. His “ma ticks off a list/of seeds: Tohill, from tuathal,/meaning ‘withershins’--with its regrettable overtones/of sunworship--in our beloved Goidelic.”

Just as O’Higgins said “There is inherent vice//in everything,” so also this mother taught her son the Catholic vice inherent in sex, and it haunts him, nearly with the madness of King Lear. She is doubled and shadowed by S---, the poet’s lover during the Sixties, done in by her own hand. In them he recognizes the deep and ancient link, for men, between women and (frustrated) desire and war. He is tormented, and his poems are haunted, by images of war. Even the sweet bucolic of “Cows” is menaced by a “command wire at the trough” that may be linked to a bomb.

Graves said that the poet’s ancient work was to reconcile warring partners. In an earlier book, we remember, Muldoon went looking for his missing father, who “disappeared/and took passage, almost for Argentina . . . /While he has gone no further than Brazil.”

Now, the poem called “Brazil” is one key to unriddling the title, for this Brazil is Breasal’s Island, or Hy-Brazil, the mythic Irish land of pleasure and feasting. It is the world of dream and longing in which his mismatched parents lived while they spent their hard, hungry lives on the farmland, seeded from Tohill’s catalogue, that is about to be swept away. It is the verbal video of the poet-son’s boy’s books of legendary heroes, his imagined flights of derring-do beside Mike Fink, Arthur and Cuchulain. But Hy-Brazil doubles, in the poem’s mind-movie, into S---’s terrible, drug-filled dreams of “kingdoms naked in the trembling heart.”

The poet (like Ross Macdonald) searched for the lost father (“It seemed I would forever be driving west”). He headed west in the Sixties and got as far as California. There, the vision goes psychedelic, as one image writhes against another and wipes it out. Drugs call up false prophecies; and he has a very bad trip. In his mastery of these images, Muldoon is the peer of Thomas Pynchon, whose “Vineland,” a true myth-fiction of California in the Sixties, delineates an American naivete and our endless fascination with evil.

But why has the poet tried to solve the riddle of the expunged words? We can turn for insight to the companion to “The Annals,” called “The Prince of the Quotidian,” published simultaneously (by Wake Forest) and meant to resolve “questions” raised by that volume. The poet is visited by a revenant, “A man with a belly like a poisoned/pup . . . much the worse for drink,” who demands he return to the real work: “making metaphors.”

he slaps my cheek; “Above all else, you must atone

for everything you’ve said and done

against your mother: meet excess of love

with excess of love. . . .”

The poet--this must have been fearsome--will go back to the beginning. “The Annals,” dedicated to the memory of his mother, opens with a rendering of Ovid’s Leto. In homage (he once had made light of that daughter of the Titans), he acknowledges her “vindictive” power to reduce men, who scorned to aid a woman and her children in need, to frogs, eternally cursing and babbling in their muddy pool.

We come to the last word: deasil, mentioned once and not repeated; this key we must find by ourselves. In Irish, deasil means to travel in the direction of the sun. For the ancients, wrote the scholar Thomas F. O’Rahill, “to go dessel or right-handwise, thus imitating the course of the sun, was not only the right way to make a journey, but it was likewise beneficial in other affairs of life, and was likely to lead to a prosperous result.”

We now comprehend: in atonement, the poet has gone on a poet’s circuit back through his poems; he has gone widdershins through the legends and history that enriched them, and the memories of experience that formed them, at every moment watching and listening for psychic echoes of the expunged words. By circling back through heart-wrench, he has tried to heal, and to reconcile all parties, to put them at one, as the poet once was obligated to do with his art. This poet longs for the gift of curing, but is given only perfect grief and the ashes of fury, as in the beautiful “Incantata,” when he cannot call back his lover from the death she accepted. (Inversely, in “The Birth,” weeping, he sings his new daughter into the world, by calling its lovely things to surround her.)

Deasil is a lost word of rightness; for the poet, its promise cannot be fulfilled in life. The wheel turns, his vision ends; and he is left standing, emptied (this is the real fate of visionaries) but minus relief, without respite. Nothing sentimental in this hard, clean end.

To go the right way, for us, is to read the annals from beginning to end, in their reasonable order, unearthing their meanings, for there is nothing accidental in these poems; every word, every reference, every allusion, carries meaning. That is the art, the gorgeous music of language, the poet has made of his harrowing vision-memories. As the poet--this is his triumph, it is what marks this book with what may be greatness--Paul Muldoon never flinches in his brilliant verbal workings, while his “I,” the tormented boy/man, the ancient mariner singing to us his holy and unholy visions, endures real suffering; and if he is not granted rest, we who are reading are given a version of the perfected, the classical peace we might feel at the end of a sun-wise journey, in which we have seen revealed to us “how art may be made.”