Amazing grace

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Horse Latitudes

Poems

Paul Muldoon

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 108 pp., $22

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The End of the Poem

Oxford Lectures

Paul Muldoon

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 406 pp., $30

THERE has never been much doubt that Paul Muldoon, a native of Northern Ireland long resident in the United States, has the intellectual brilliance, erudition and technical mastery to be a great poet. The question has been, rather: Is that what he wants?

His masterpiece, published in 1990, is “Madoc: A Mystery,” a heady farrago of historical and philosophical speculation about what might have happened if Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey had carried through with their intention to found an experimental utopia in the United States and had run into Aaron Burr and Lewis and Clark in the process. This lengthy poem, almost a novel in verse, has the astonishing cosmopolitan intellectual reach of Ezra Pound in the early Cantos -- with a sense of humor.

Like virtually every poet of his generation, Muldoon has always drawn liberally on popular culture as a source of imagery, yet unlike most of his contemporaries he is also firmly grounded in classical models. It would be hard to say who has influenced him more, Ovid or Warren Zevon. Yet Muldoon’s post-”Madoc” collections have not always been successful in their melding of low and high; the Pulitzer Prize for his last collection, “Moy Sand and Gravel” (2002), seemed to have been awarded more for a body of work than for this most ill-assorted collection of the poet’s mature career.

His new collection, “Horse Latitudes,” affirms anew that the poet is capable of sustaining an ethereal loftiness of discourse in a poetic language of exquisite grace. The title work, a cycle of 19 sonnets, blends an emotionally charged meditation on mortality with a raptor-eyed view of the ravages of war throughout history. The cancer that destroys the poet’s lover, Carlotta, is likened with subtle inventiveness to medieval machines of death. When Carlotta lights a cigarette, it is transformed into a falconet, a miniature cannon of the 16th century, laying siege to her body. The surgeon’s knife becomes a modern iron maiden.

As the chapters of “Madoc” were headed with the names of great Western thinkers, from Thales to Stephen Hawking, the sonnets of “Horse Latitudes” have as rubrics the names of historic battles beginning with “B.” Some of the poems deal straightforwardly with the conflict, as in “Bosworth Field,” narrated from the point of view of the vanquished Richard III:

It was clear now, through the pell-mell

of bombard- and basilisk-mist,

that the Stanleys had done the dirt

on him and taken Henry’s side.

The references to America’s invasion of Iraq are oblique -- a passing mention of “weapons of mass destruction” in one sonnet, naming another “Basra” (though it does not allude directly to the battle there in 2003) -- but the conflict exerts a deep, baleful influence over the entire cycle. The title “Horse Latitudes” is an old sailor’s name for zones of the North and South Atlantic where ships were often fatally becalmed. According to legend, in order to survive the doldrums the crews of Spanish galleons bound for the New World cast their horses overboard to conserve water: a chilling, powerful expression of one view of the Iraq War.

Yet Muldoon, being Muldoon, is also probably referring to Jim Morrison’s visionary chant of the same title on the Doors’ “Strange Days” album. The poet’s fascination with the classical music of the counterculture turns up in several poems, such as “The Last Time I Saw Chris,” with its nod to a famous Joni Mitchell tune (“The Last Time I Saw Richard”). A pedestrian poem about a Bob Dylan concert at Princeton scarcely rises above the level of a quirky fan letter, but a scrappy reminiscence of Zevon, “Sillyhow Stride,” delivers a surprising emotional wallop.

Muldoon is sometimes called a poet’s poet because of his dazzling technical prowess. In addition to 45 sonnets in a spectacular array of original metrics and rhyme schemes, “Horse Latitudes” also has an album of witty haiku, an old-fashioned (and easy) riddle, slant-rhymed Dantean terza rima, and a pantoum, which is a Malay ballad form. The book isn’t quite inexhaustible, but it rewards many readings with rare intellectual pleasure; the title sequence, which unifies emotion and language in a perfectly tuned harmony, may be the finest sonnet cycle published since Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Orpheus” sonnets in 1922.

Coinciding with the release of “Horse Latitudes,” Muldoon’s publisher has collected the lectures he gave as Oxford Professor of Poetry: 15 public talks from 1999 to 2004, bundled under the title “The End of the Poem.” They are close readings of mostly British and American, mostly 20th century poems. He includes works by those predecessors in the Oxford chair whom one would like to hear about (Matthew Arnold, C. Day Lewis, W.H. Auden, Robert Graves and Muldoon’s mentor, Seamus Heaney); major works by major poets, such as Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats and Robert Frost; and worthy works by minor poets (Stevie Smith and H.D.).

Some of the lectures are magisterial in their insights: Muldoon’s grasp of Eugenio Montale’s “L’anguilla” seems complete. For the English translation, he chooses Robert Lowell’s appalling, error-ridden travesty in “Imitations” to support a fresh, provocative description of the perils of translating and the duties of the translator. His lecture on Ted Hughes’ “The Literary Life” -- one of the “Birthday Letters” that Hughes addresses to his late wife, Sylvia Plath -- is a fascinating disentanglement of the legend Hughes built around Plath’s humiliation at the hands of Marianne Moore, then the reigning queen of transatlantic belles-lettres. Muldoon discovers yet another unsuspected layer of irony in Hughes’ defense of his wife. But there are also many, many pages devoted to obscure, cryptic allusions in the poems -- allusions that rely heavily on anagrams and homonyms, often involving words not in the texts. Frost’s “The Mountain,” for example, is said to harbor a reference to the philosopher George Berkeley, in “driftwood stripped of bark” together with (much farther along) the words “pasture” and “field,” which are synonyms of “lea,” and “ravine,” a synonym of “gorge,” which is almost “George.” There are far too many such lunatic leaps -- the overripe fruit of Freudian dream analysis, undertaken for reasons as obscure as the allusions themselves.

Nor does Muldoon have any interest in the question of taste: He never explains why he has chosen these particular poems; it’s simply taken for granted that they’re good poems. Criticism as a ranking of poems in terms of “greatness” now holds interest for few readers, but Muldoon’s lectures amount to a syllabus of contemporary poetry without a rationale. One of the few poems he does classify as great is John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” the intensely sentimental, enormously popular eulogy for the dead of World War I, whereas T.S. Eliot, the most influential poet of the 20th century, comes up only twice, in a lame put-down by the duke of Windsor and a brief citation of a footnote from “The Waste Land.”

Muldoon obviously has strong opinions: An aesthetic defense of McCrae (at the expense of Eliot!) would make fascinating reading, but that’s not where his interests lie. His talent is for building fabulous machines, not for explaining how their engines work. Like most poets, he lacks the critical temperament. The real point of his lectures is to pick texts apart and put them back together again, showing how they might work if they were Paul Muldoon poems. Better far to read and reread “Horse Latitudes”; for this reader, a dozen times has been just a beginning. That’s one mark of -- that vexatious word again -- greatness. *