Someone Else

Adam Phillips

• BuyThe End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures on Poetry by Paul Muldoon
  Faber, 406 pp, £25.00, October 2006, ISBN 0 571 22740 6
• BuyHorse Latitudes by Paul Muldoon
  Faber, 107 pp, £14.99, October 2006, ISBN 0 571 23234 5

Paul Muldoon excluded himself from Contemporary Irish Poetry, his 1986 Faber anthology, but he included a poem by Seamus Heaney that was dedicated to him. We don’t of course know why the poem was dedicated to him, or indeed whether it is in any sense about him. It is a suggestive poem about what the living can get from the dead:

Widgeon
For Paul Muldoon

It had been badly shot.
While he was plucking it
he found, he says, the voice box –

like a flute stop
in the broken windpipe –

and blew upon it
unexpectedly
his own small widgeon cries.

Muldoon has said often enough in interviews that he likes ‘ventriloquising’ in his poetry, likes being able to do himself in different voices; but I take this poem to be, among other things, a warning and a question to Muldoon from the poet who was once his teacher, and about whom, at least on paper, Muldoon has the most genial and admiring of mixed feelings.