unavowed engagement impression of a simultaneity of worthy engagement and equally worthy scepticism
ofengagement, on which Muldoon’s reputation to a great extent rests. The absence
of any direct confrontation with the moral implications of violence means that,
for readers, their presence is felt on the margins throughout his early volumes,
underpinning their apparent evasiveness with a seriousness that is the more
unchallengeable because never owned. While more straightforward (or perhaps
more cynical) readers simply find, with Helen Vendler, ‘a hole in the middle where
the feeling should be’,^45 others will extrapolate from this absence an unspoken
moral awareness all the stronger for its suspicion of the perils of articulation.
Carolyn Forche, editor of ́ Against Forgetting, an anthology of the work of
‘significant poets who endured conditions of historical and social extremity’,
stipulates that, for inclusion, ‘poets must have personally endured such conditions’.
This seems to privilege Rawlinson’s model of engaged testimony; however, she also
asserts that ‘Regardless of ‘‘subject matter’’, these poems bear the trace of extremity
within them, and they are, as such, evidence of what occurred....I was interested in
what these poets wrote, regardless of the explicit content.’^46 This suggests another
way in which war poetry operates, and one which is far more applicable to Muldoon.
Alongside the construction of war poetry as explicit, morally motivated witness
to horrifying experience, there is a simultaneous assumption that writing from
an extreme situation will be marked by that situation, however unapparent such
marking might be. Muldoon’s poetry and itsreception provide an extreme instance
of the way in which witness—the location of significance in an artwork’s relation
to its context in extremity—is a function as much of the way a poem is read, as
how it is written.
Around fifteen years after he left Northern Ireland, Muldoon published the
long poem ‘At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999’,^47 which includes,
amongst many other things, reference to the twentieth century’s most evocative,
memorialized instance of suffering, the Nazi Holocaust. There are many similarities
between ‘Black Horse’ and ‘The More a Man Has’: both are end-of-volume long
poems, in which disparate subject-matter is drawn together through little more
than the poet’s apparent whim. ‘Black Horse’ is loosely set in the aftermath of
Hurricane Floyd: the wash of debris down the Delaware and Raritan canal in New
Jersey (beside which Muldoon now lives) is reimagined as a deluge of twentieth-
century history, as represented by the European- and American-Jewish forebears of
Muldoon’s new son, Asher. Diverse historic characters and episodes are amassed,
without much indication that the speaker, overwhelmed by detail, differentiates
much between them: ‘the 1920 Studebaker’s [earlier identified with Asher’s distant
(^45) Helen Vendler, ‘Anglo-Celtic Attitudes’,New York Review of Books, 6 Nov. 1997, 58.
(^46) Carolyn Forche, in ́ idem(ed.),Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness(New
York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 30.
(^47) Muldoon, ‘At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999’, inMoy Sand and Gravel(London:
Faber, 2002), 73–90.