april warman
relative Arnie Rothstein, 1920s ballgame-fixer and bootlegger] just one step ahead
ofa Panther tank|nodding approvingly through the ghetto after the Germans have
massacred|the Jews of Bialystok’.
As with ‘The More a Man Has’, critical reception has emphasized the poem’s
‘technical dexterity’^48 and ‘verbal interlacings’;^49 Laura Quinney identifies in it
exactly the same strategy of ‘addressing grim topics in a hard, high-spirited vein’^50
that is so prominent inQuoof. The approach to the Holocaust of ‘Black Horse’
has the same air of affectlessness, of attention to linguistic detail rather than to
the moral burden of what its language conveys, as does that of ‘The More a
Man Has’ to the Troubles. For example, the sinister image, ‘A tattoo on the left
forearm|of some child-kin of my children, a very faint tattoo’, stands alone, without
comment; the tone of the (frequently repeated) phrase ‘child-kin of my children’
hovers troublingly between the shockingly sentimental (and vicariously narcissistic)
and the alarmingly arch: a morally responsible narrator is absent. However, such
similarities of tone conceal a fundamental difference between the two poems, which
arises from Muldoon’s differing relations to the ‘grim topics’ each poem addresses.
While the Troubles were inescapably part of Muldoon’s immediate experience,
his relation to the Holocaust is indirect and mediated, his decision to address it
voluntary; he has no more authoritative connection to it than his readers do.^51
‘The More a Man Has’ deploys a form—narrative—which naturally coheres,
and which it is Muldoon’s achievement to disrupt and fragment, thereby resisting
readerly expectations that would extrapolate from the poem’s context and content a
coherent moral response to violence within it. The form of ‘Black Horse’, however,
is basically that of a catalogue, a form which is naturally disjunctive,^52 but which
it is Muldoon’s achievement in the poem to make cohere. The poem contains
a number of elements which invite the reader to make connections between its
disparate components. One is its reworking of Yeats’s ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’:
it paraphrases this profusely, often to nonsensical ends, but sometimes to hint
indirectly at a governing meaning for the poem’s chaotic miscellany. Near the
beginning of the poem the hope is expressed that ‘we might bundle a few belongings
into a pillow slip|and climb the hill and escape, Please Examine||Your Change, to
a place where the soul might recover radical innocence’—this last notion adapts
Yeats. But the poem ends less hopefully: Asher’s soul is ‘less likely than ever to
(^48) Michael Kinsella, ‘On Being Preposterous’,PN Review, 29/4 (Mar.–Apr. 2003), 71.
(^49) Jenny Ludwig, ‘As If Washing Might Make It Clean’,Boston Review, Summer 2003;http://www.
bostonreview.net/BR28.3/ludwig.html
(^50) Laura Quinney, ‘In the Studebaker’,London Review of Books, 23 Oct. 2003, 20.
(^51) The tenuous connections that Muldoon suggests between himself and the Holocaust—the
insistent emphasis on his children’s ancestry, or the Judaization of the Irish navvies with whom he
identifies (they become ‘schlemiels’ and ‘schmucks’ who ‘keen and kvetch’)—serve only to highlight
his actual remoteness from the event.
(^52) See John Lyon, ‘Michael Longley’s Lists’,English, 45/183 (1996), 228–46, for an excellent account
of the functions of listing in poetry.