Harvest

A poet, unlike a movie actor, has no stunt double. But when the Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon writes, in his eighth collection, “Hay,” “I was standing in for myself, my own stunt double / in a scene where I was meant to do a double / or maybe even triple back somersault,” on some level he’s offering the claim, both serious and sly, as a model for his own poetry. Muldoon’s work is characterized by feints and dodges and subtle ironies, by its tonal range from serious to comic, high to low, and by an expansive appetite for experience--linguistic, sexual and imaginative.

Born in Northern Ireland in 1951, Muldoon published his first book, “New Weather,” in 1972 when he was 21. Critics called him a prodigy and, indeed, he seemed to have more in common with the virtuosic skill of young musicians than of young poets. Over the years, he has been criticized for being clever to a fault; to detractors, his ingenuity seems like purposeful opacity, more trick than art (thus the jokey self-consciousness of the stunt double), whereas his admirers consider him deeply original.

“Hay,” an uncharacteristically direct collection, shows the poet at a crossroads. The poetry is still gamesome and formal; among numerous sonnets we find a pantun, a superb ghazel, a villanelle and (no light feat) a double sestina--but there are many plain-spoken and openly personal poems, including an autobiography in the form of erratum slips (“For ‘religion’ read ‘region’ ”); a gleefully wicked poem called “The Little Black Book” (“What ever happened to Sile? Sile, who led me to horse-worship between her legs”); “Sleeve Notes,” a series of annotations to favorite rock ‘n’ roll albums; and 90 haikus documenting his family’s life in Hopewell, N.J., where Muldoon lives. “Hay” is preoccupied by alternate versions of reality and by doubleness, a concern that may stem from Muldoon’s status as a transplanted poet. Two poems about journeys--”The Mudroom” and “The Bangle (Slight Return)”--frame the book, mirroring each other’s rhymes; their peripatetic references and careful inventories of old possessions suggest the poet’s preoccupation with exile (although he pointedly avoids this word) as a state both liberating and alienated.

For Muldoon, these journeys are more than geographic or even political ideas; they are part of the poet’s resistance to singular alliances, his dedication to the possibility of language. This is suggested by the allusive, fractured conclusion of “Wire,” one of the book’s most successful poems. With one foot in Northern Ireland and one in the “hillside of hillsides in Connecticut,” Muldoon transforms the poem’s political subtext into a description of imaginative experience:

. . . A distant raking through the gearbox

of a truck suddenly gone haywire

on this hillside of hillsides in Connecticut

brought back some truck on a bomb run,

brought back so much with which I’d hoped to break--

the hard line

yet again refusing to toe the line,

. . . The truckdriver handing the box

cutter, I’m sure, to the bald guy. A pair of real live wires.

I’ve listened to them all day now, torn between making a break

for it and their talk of the long run, the short term, of boxing clever,

fish or cut bait, make or break,

the end of the line, right down to the wire.

Muldoon’s long poems intertwine different levels of reality, weaving them into a landscape that can be hallucinatory in its breadth. His previous collection, “The Annals of Chile,” contained two fine examples: “Incantata,” a powerful elegy for an artist friend, and “Yarrow,” a chronicle of poetic formation. “Hay’s” long sonnet series, “The Bangle (Slight Return),” is a reprise of the semiautobiographical “Yarrow” but concerns itself primarily with life that never came to be. The poem’s epigram, from E.M. Cioran, refers to an “unrealized plenitude,” speculating that it might be best not to have been born--a state of pure possibility that Muldoon regards with a certain nostalgia. With Virgil as guide and the “Aeneid” for background, the poem slides from Muldoon’s absurd encounter with a haughty waiter in a French restaurant (“To have your cake / and eat bigarroons and Bonderay au foin?”) to a fabricated account of his father’s emigration to Australia (an event that almost took place, according to an earlier poem; if it had, Muldoon would never have been born). The poem has great musical and rhetorical force, and--although its elaborate construction and crosscutting never quite achieve the emotional power of “Incantata”--its redemptive meditation on the slipperiness of time is an substantive investigation of personal loss.

Randall Jarrell once wrote that “the writer’s real dishonesty is to give an easy paraphrase of the hard truth.” It is equally dishonest to give an elaborate version of a simple truth. This is an anxiety of Muldoon’s, who has said that “to write simply is the most difficult thing to do.” By this he means that it is difficult to write poetry that is complex, original but also emotionally accessible. In one of “Hay’s” most skillful and moving poems, the ghazel, “They that Wash on Thursdays,” he writes:

So I learned firsthand

to deal in the off-, the under-, the sleight-of-hand,

writing now in that great, open hand,

yet never quite showing my hand,

--lines that describe his fluid, canting work as aptly as any critic has.

But many of the best poems in “Hay” achieve a directness that is rewardingly difficult. In the title poem, Muldoon describes driving along “Province Line Road” and coming upon a Volvo with hay bales on its roof:

My hands are raw. I’m itching to cut the twine, to unpack

that hay accordion, that hay-concertina.

It must be ten o’clock. There’s still enough light

(not least the glow

of the bales themselves) for a body to ascertain

that when one bursts, as now, something takes flight

from those hot-and-heavy box pleats. This much, at least, I know.

Robert Frost’s thumbprint has long marked Muldoon’s work, and Muldoon has kept up a fruitful dialogue with him (seen in lyrics like “An Seo,” “Gold,” “How to Play Championship Tennis”). This poem (and by implication, the book’s title) is, among other things, a homage to Frost and glancingly alludes to Frost’s famous early poem, “Mowing.” Like “Mowing,” it amounts to a declaration of poetics. Frost saw poetry as a form of work (“no dream of the gift of idle hours / Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf”) that is equivalent to field labor: “My long scythe whispered, and left the hay to make.” For Muldoon, however, poetry is an itching of the fingers, a kind of necessary playfulness shaped by the presence of restrictions such as province lines.

It’s that intersection between the playful imagination (which produces both allegories and wry lyrics) and worldly reality (political, social or ethical) that lends Muldoon’s poetry its arresting quality, the contradictory recklessness of his formality. If his weakness lies in too often remaining obscure, this collection gestures toward a desire for a less elusive poetics.

“Hay” is--often productively-- a disjunctive collection. At their charismatic best, Muldoon’s strange, vital poems deliver an instant pleasure, while their giddy sense of discovery keeps one coming back for more.