Muldoon – A Mystery

Michael Hofmann

• Madoc – A Mystery by Paul Muldoon
  Faber, 261 pp, £14.99, October 1990, ISBN 0 571 14489 6

Looked at in one way, Madoc – A Mystery is an extraordinary and unpredictable departure, a book of poems the size of many novels, with a title poem nigh on two hundred and fifty pages long, doubling Muldoon’s output at a stroke. But in another way, it does remarkably little to change the sense one has of Paul Muldoon. It is a book for initiates, more of the same. Each of his previous five volumes has ended with something a little longer, a relaxing gallop after the dressage – even ‘The Year of the Sloes, for Ishi’ in New Weather (1973) was four pages long. Further, the structure of Madoc is actually identical with that of Muldoon’s last book, Meeting the British (1987) – in fact, it seems like a monstrously curtailed and distended parody of it: the prose poem at the start, a section of short poems (no more than six), and then the pièce de résistance, which, for all its length, occupies just one line on the contents page, as though the poet were telling us it’s no big deal.