unavowed engagement the ‘jagged’ disjunction, citing vindicatory precedent for it: ‘The combination of
intractablematerial with intricate formal methods was a particular strength of
W. B. Yeats.’^60
Longley questions the wisdom of Muldoon’s addressing the Holocaust: ‘The
Jewish material may be too much to internalize in the way that the ‘‘Prayer for My
Daughter’’ template requires.’ She goes on to note that, in this poem, ‘Muldoon’s
comedy and his seriousness are, for once, slightly at odds.’^61 I would suggest that
this being ‘at odds’ results from the fact that both the poem’s ‘comedy’ and its
‘seriousness’ come across as deliberately intended by Muldoon. He is responsible
for both its bizarre juxtapositions and verbal playfulnessandits attempt seriously
to address the issue of the individual’s relation to history (unlike inQuoof,where
only the ‘comedy’ can be unquestionably attributed to the author). Because readers
will not approach ‘Black Horse’ with preconceived expectations for such an earnest
attempt, responsibility for the poem’s ‘seriousness’ cannot be offloaded on to
them; the dissonance between the two elements cannot be interpreted as oblique
representation of the jarring that occurs when an individual comes up against the
preconceptions of the world: it can only be a jarring of his intended meaning against
his chosen method of presentation.
In a review of new English poetry, Jeremy Noel-Tod writes: ‘The problem with
English imitators of Muldoon is that they lack the volatile subtext of the Troubles to
give their mental meanderings significance.’^62 While I would by no means demote
Muldoon to the status of a self-imitator (judging by the recentHorse Latitudes,
he clearly retains his potential for self-reinvention), Noel-Tod’s comment does
indicate how much Muldoon abandons when he exchanges the endlessly volatile
(because incontrovertibly private) subtext ofhis own experience (including his
experience of living in a time and place of violence) for the relatively stable (because
fundamentally public) investigation of the individual’s relation to twentieth-century
history, ‘our increasingly jagged age’. Muldoon’s apparently growing commitment
to such an investigation is a brave, as well as a hugely interesting, development; but
his singular approach may undergo some adjustment before it can best sustain it.
(^60) Muldoon,quotedinBrownandPaterson(eds.),Don’t Ask Me What I Mean, 195.
(^61) Longley, ‘Twists and Turns’, 66.
(^62) Jeremy Noel-Tod, ‘Poetic Staples’,Poetry Review, 92/4 (Winter 2002–3), 114.