In the Gasworks

David Wheatley

• To Ireland, I by Paul Muldoon
  Oxford, 150 pp, £19.99, March 2000, ISBN 0 19 818475 1
• Bandanna by Paul Muldoon
  Faber, 64 pp, £7.99, February 1999, ISBN 0 571 19762 0
• The Birds translated by Paul Muldoon, with Richard Martin
  Gallery Press, 80 pp, £13.95, July 1999, ISBN 1 85235 245 0
• Reading Paul Muldoon by Clair Wills
  Bloodaxe, 222 pp, £10.95, October 1998, ISBN 1 85224 348 1

Marcel Aymé’s novel Le Passemuraille, about a man who can walk through walls, would have interested Thomas Caulfield Irwin (1823-92). Irwin is cited in Paul Muldoon’s To Ireland, I for a neighbourly dispute he was having with one John O’Donovan. ‘He says I am his enemy,’ Irwin wrote, ‘and watch him through the thickness of the wall which divides our houses. One of us must leave. I have a houseful of books; he has an umbrella and a revolver.’ Seasoned readers of Muldoon know all about trying to see through inscrutable partitions: for most of his career he has resisted the temptation to come out from behind his poems and explain himself in prose. Before To Ireland, I, Muldoon’s critical pronouncements had always been a scarce commodity, not least in The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry with its notorious editorial no-show.