april warman
meaning for his poetry, Muldoon, in ‘Black Horse’, works to engineer meaning,
andinvite particular interpretations. He has been more than usually eager to guide
the reading of this poem, declaring, ‘I hope that readers will come to terms with the
jagged edges of ‘‘At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999’’ ’, and explaining
(or even excusing) such ‘jaggedness’ by uncharacteristically prescriptive reference
to the ‘necessity of modern poetry to reflect our increasingly jagged age’.^57
In many ways, this new insistence that poetry should engage with history is
admirable: Muldoon-the-poet is finally admitting his connection with Muldoon-
the-man, tied to, and responsible to, a specific historical moment. MacFarlane
praisesMoy Sand and Gravelas a vindicating exposition of the covert ethicality
he has always read into Muldoon’s work, a proof that Muldoon has all along
had a ‘grander plan to...bring [his readers] into confrontation with what he
calls the ‘‘dark matter’’ of existence’.^58 What I find problematic is that Muldoon
continues, in this new context, to deploy devices that distance his speaker from
his material, when his relation to such material is already (as it was not inQuoof)
fairly remote. In choosing to address a broad, if eclectically represented, sweep of
twentieth-century history, Muldoon is not subject to the ‘improper expectations’
that Longley famously identifies as the burden of Ulster poets.^59 A moral evaluation
of such history is not an interpretation for which his poems will be read whatever
their ostensible content: it is, in fact, one that would not occur to readers had he
not raised the subject. In regard to the Holocaust in particular, he, in his distance
from the event, is in the same position as his readers: any danger of prurient,
predetermined reading comes as much from him as from them.
TheQuoof-like gap between horrific subject-matter and affectless presentation
still appears. It is hard to know what to make of a narrator who announces:
The red stain on the lint
that covered whatever it was in the autoclave brought back an afternoon in Poland
when the smoke would fling and flail itself, Maximum Headroom,
from a crematorium
at Auschwitz.But in ‘Black Horse’ the disjunction has the effect of appearing to conceal, and
thus privilege, a response that is no different, no more in need of protection, than
anyone else’s. If devices such as deadpan narration and a foregrounding of verbal
briofunction to dramatize a subjectivity damaged into affectlessness by the events
it recounts, then Muldoon would appear to be claiming a special sensitivity (and
therefore a special licence to apparent callousness) to events that are properly no
more damaging to him than to any other individual living in the long aftermath
of the Second World War. Muldoon seems himself aware of some indecorum in
(^57) Muldoon, in Brown and Paterson (eds.),Don’t Ask Me What I Mean, 195.
(^58) MacFarlane, ‘High and Dry in the Flood’, 24.
(^59) Longley, ‘Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland’, 185.