His Poems Are a Joy to Hear, Even When Their Meanings Aren’t Clear

JOY IN SERVICE ON RUE TAGORE, by Paul Muldoon

A few weeks after my editor assigned me this review, I came close to sending him a panicked email. “I can’t pretend to have any idea what Paul Muldoon is talking about,” I wanted to say. “The book is clogged with so many arcane references that my brain lapses into fog when I open to a random page.”

Muldoon’s work has been part of the global cultural conversation for half a century now, and part of its lasting appeal — for those who soldier on through any initial confusion — can be compared to the pleasure of puzzles. (Or artichokes, in the sense that you have to peel away the tough outer petals in order to arrive at the tender heart.) Many of his signature poems from past decades, such as “Meeting the British” and “The Sightseers” and “Lag” and “Errata,” have served as a showcase for entry-level gaming: Use a little brainpower (and maybe a search engine) and you can suss out the allusions, at which point the full force of a poem might just punch you in the gut. In his best work, time dissolves. The sediment separating sections of human history melts away. The centuries commingle and — to borrow a phrase from the movie “Almost Famous” — it’s all happening.

But over time Muldoon’s riddles have become more riddled, and his laboratory of wordplay more labyrinthine. If there’s a common assumption that poetry is something you read with your smartphone off so that you can get lost in it, Muldoon’s latest verse represents the opposite: Without a phone at hand, you’ll just get lost. Unless you happen to be a person who can identify Milo of Croton, the Sopwith Camel, Foghorn Leghorn, Diego de Vargas, Château Latour, Chang and Eng, Stephen Trask, Daisy Mayhem, Lord Snowdon, Theophrastus, Marc Bolan, Tony Visconti, Burl Ives, Parker Knoll, Laxton’s Superbs, Samuel Pepys and Belfast Lough without surrendering to the guidance of Google. (And if you can, congratulations — you’re the winner of the first annual Christopher Hitchens Memorial Prize for Knowing Everything.)

Those names, and many more, overflow from the pages of Muldoon’s latest collection, “Joy in Service on Rue Tagore.” (I’ll save you from grabbing your phone: Rabindranath Tagore, born in 1861, was a poet, a Nobel Prize winner and a colossal figure in the literary history of India.) Having been young in the 1970s, I had no problem with Foghorn Leghorn (the Looney Tunes cartoon rooster) and Marc Bolan (the glam-rock god who fronted T. Rex) and David Bowie’s record producer Tony Visconti. I figured out that a Laxton’s Superb is a type of apple because it appeared in a poem called “Ducking for Apples.” But in that same poem I stopped in my tracks at this line: “What gazed back at Nietzsche was in fact Abyssinia/now he’d gazed so long into the abyss.” Gazing into the abyss? I know the feeling.

This leads to a question: Do you need to “understand” every beat of Paul Muldoon’s poetry in order to enjoy it? As with the work of John Ashbery, a lack of comprehension doesn’t necessarily impede delight. Using my very scientific “open to a random page” method of reading “Joy in Service on Rue Tagore,” I found myself marveling (as I often have) at Muldoon’s virtuosic gift for rhyme and his uncanny sense of rhythm. He’s got flow. Consider this passage from a poem called “Artichokes and Truffles”: