Paul Muldoon’s Moy Sand and Gravel

I’m humble enough to admit I came late to the party with this particular poet. I’ve bumped into his poetry once or twice but never really engaged with it, until now.

There’s a heightened degree of verbal joy and awareness with most poets, to state the blatantly obvious, flaunting a love of words and what they can do, how they can be arranged and bent to fit a purpose. It’s a part of the preconceived notions when you pick up a piece of poetry, the clear expectation that some of the entertainment and enjoyment will come from the writer’s ability to show the malleability of language without losing sight of the content.

Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) has me reaching for my thesaurus already at the title. The Moy, in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland wasn’t on my literary map, and hence I dove in at the deep end right from the title page. It’s like that sometimes, you get in over your head before you’ve even started. So, that being said, you have, in the title, an excellent suggestion of what to expect and that is a feat in itself.

Muldoon’s poetry has a kind of breakneck speed approach to language, complete with hairpin curves and all. I like a bit of trickery and deceit in my poetry, a bit of cleverness and clear intent. Those things you will find in rich abundance in Moy Sand and Gravel. The literary references are many and varied, the landscape is both Irish and American with many rich cross-breed interconnections. The vernacular goes high and low in both languages and that creates the kind of need for focused close reading that most often seems to benefit poetry in general and this kind of poetry in particular.

It’s not hard to track the traces of T.S. Eliot’s “mythic method”, the notion that there is something atavistic to storytelling, in the way Muldoon approaches the content. There’s also clockwork precision in how the many threads and wires and cogs and wheels of Muldoon’s vast store of imagery comes together. It’s intricate and clearly close focus work, but there’s a wild sense of play too, something removed from the presupposed solemnity of poems.

Here’s an example…

The Killdeer

Why was he trying to clear
a space in the forest of beech
by turning beech posts and, by beech pegs,
fitting each to each?

For the reason at which the killdeer
seems to be clutching
when she lays her four pear-shaped eggs
with the pointed ends touching.

When it comes to poetry it seems the reader’s experience is even more guiding than with prose. You have to be willing to undertake reading text of this density, same as you would with Eliot, or Seamus Heaney for that matter, to bring up another Irish poet. The connection there is, of course, that both Muldoon and Heaney have won the T.S. Eliot Prize. And this seems like a digression, doesn’t it? But that’s the trickery in all this – there are connections because of the level of artistry in the oeuvre of these gentlemen. Muldoon’s poems even rhyme, on occasion. There’s more to all this than the language thing, or the Irish thing, or the prize winning. There’s more to it than the punning and sly wit, the sleight of hand, the alliterations and contextualization and archaic what-not. Reading Muldoon means I have to flex my literary muscles and try to keep up. That’s always enjoyable. I also find that my inner voice takes on an Irish lilt, which probably helps.

Mule

Billy the Kid

Staying on the trail of Michael Ondaatje I would like to get in to The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970). If you have come into contact with Ondaatje’s work through his novels you will probably be a bit surprised by his poetry and books like this one, which is a sort of prose poem combining differnt styles and modes of expression.

The main character is the outlaw gunman Billy the Kid (1859-1881) also known as William H. Bonney or Henry McCarty. Undoubtedly you’ve seen some cowboy western featuring Billy, there have been a few made of varying quality (I wont pass judgement on Young Guns or even Billy the Kid v.s. Dracula). He is one of those iconic figures that loom out of the myths of Manifest Destiny along with Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Black Elk and so on and so forth.

Ondaatje takes hold of his subject with a mixture of scholarly intensity and poetic verve. Some passages read like newspaper articles, others are short lists (people that have been killed, for example) again others are copies of the Penny Dreadfuls of the time featuring wild west characters. There’s a rough kind of humor in some passages, lyrical descriptions of a love interest, sex, death, horses… And the wide landscape Billy travels through. The descriptions are intense and slightly dreamy. They are the kind of distant musings you’d expect from someone who spends the entire day on horseback staring at the horizon.

Ondaatje also changes perspecitves in the sense that the narrative voice shifts, quoting Miss Sallie Chisum for instance. I like the diversity of the many voices and different types of text. It creates a collage of thoughts and impressions surrounding the iconic figure of Billy giving the reader a different image of what he was like as well as what the times were like. History is often recited as a given truth and this accentuates that you can never really know what actions and events are really like when you depend on eye witness accounts and the impressions of others. You get a kind of historical event refractured through many minds and voices – and this realates to the novle I wrote about previously Coming Through Slaughter.

I would say that this idea of history, disjointed accounts and fractured voices is a central theme in all of Ondaatjes work. Just like the lyrical passages and the obvious romance with language which is ever present in his body of work. He not only takes care to find the right word, he also creates a voice for each character which is distinct and clear. This care of language and voice is one of the reasons I keep coming back to his material, pouring over it and tracing the lines with my curious mental fingers. Touching the words tentatively, moulding their shapes, turning them over and over.

This is one of my favourite passages in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.

You know hunters

are the gentlest

anywhere in the world

they halt caterpillars

from path dangers

lift a drowning moth from a bowl

remarkable in peace

in the same way assassins

come to chaos neutral.

It’s terse, lyrical and nicely exemplifies the duality of the characters. Violence and poetry in a balanced blend – my favourite.

MULE

Les Murray and the German plastic bag of culture

Ok. So. First a quick explanation. The point of this is to put Librarian-and-Mule’s intellectual capital to good use. Avid readers both of us we are heavily dependant on books not just as a way to escape reality, but as a natural part of life – like eating, sleeping or mowing the lawn. And because we like to read, we assume you like to read. And if you read then you will want to find something good to read. We offer our humble opinions on books (that might not always be so humble, but then again everyone’s a critic…) to make that process a little more interesting. I am Mule by the way.

I will start this off with Les Murray – Australian poet (born 1938). And more specifically “Subhuman Redneck poems”(1996). Murray is both funny, sad, sarcastic and lyrical. The poems are dense and carefully wrought and rich in metaphors that conjure up the archetypical Australian imagery that comes first to mind with kangaroos and Ayers rock, but there is still room for the oddball, the loser, the lost father and a lot of other really good stuff.

I’ll give a good example of why you really should read this guy… Well, apart from the fact that he’s won numerous prices (like the T.S Eliot prize for the best new book of poetry in English) and has a well established reputation.

“A Stage in Gentrification”

Most Culture had been an East German plastic bag

Pulled over our head, stifling and wet,

We see a hotly distorted world

Through crackling folds and try not to gag.

Sex, media careers, the Australian republic

And recruited depression are in that bag

With scorn of God, with self-abasement studies

And funding’s addictive smelling-rag.

Eighty million were murdered by police

In the selfsame terms and spirit which nag

And bully and set the atmosphere

Inside the East German plastic bag.

It wants to become our country’s flag

And rule by demo and kangaroo court

But it’s wearing thin. It’ll spill, and twist

And fly off still rustling Fascist! Fascist!

And catch on the same fence as Hitler, and sag.”

Come on – “most culture has been an East German plastic bag” – tell me that doesn’t catch your interest…

Mule