Description
Book SynopsisIn his eleventh full-length collection, Paul Muldoon reminds us that he is a traditional poet who is steadfastly at odds with tradition. If the poetic sequence is the main mode of
Maggot, it certainly isn''t your father''s poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W. B. Yeats''s remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are ''sex and the dead'', Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It''s no accident that the centerpiece of
Maggot is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its ''subject'' the urge to memorialize the scenes of fatal car accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title-sequence but many of the round-songs that characterize
Maggot and has led Angela Leighton, writing in the TLS, to see these new
