In the Studebaker

Laura Quinney

• Moy Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon
  Faber, 90 pp, £14.99, October 2003, ISBN 0 571 21535 1

Everyone who reads Paul Muldoon will be dazzled by his linguistic exuberance. He follows the lead of Pope and Byron, engaging in many of the displays of wit that they engage in, particularly an exotic vocabulary and inventive rhyme. He loves terms of art, slang, botanical names, the names of foodstuffs and fabrics, rare words, proper names and place names. His poems send one joyfully to the dictionary: here are ‘zarf’ (a cup-shaped holder) and ‘griffawn’ (a grubbing-axe); there ‘gusset’ (a triangular piece of land) and ‘quantong’ (an Australian fruit); ‘mosk’ (to pawn an object for more than it’s worth) and ‘hame’ (the bar on a horse’s collar). His startling rhymes include rhymes against content (‘reverie’ with ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’), rhymes across languages (‘mar bheadh’ with ‘orchestra’) and rhymes of proper names (‘bone’ with ‘Assiniboine’). This is not to say that he is incapable of spareness, but he tends towards far-fetching variety. He favours challenging rhyme schemes and difficult forms, such as the sestina and terza rima. He improvises strange, lively forms of his own: ‘One Last Draw of the Pipe’ uses ‘draw’, in its many different meanings, as an end-word in ten of its 15 lines. All his poems engage in some form of verbal play.