Derek Mahon

It would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I have taken the full measure, or anything like it, of Middleton’s Carminalenia, an intensely difficult collection about as far removed from ‘mainstream’ English poetry as it’s possible to be and yet remain, in part at least, accessible. I say ‘in part at least’, but the fact is that Middleton, to me at any rate, is more often inaccessible than not. There are notes, but the help they offer is slight. He has, of course, always been an ‘experimental’ poet, in that he has eschewed predictable patterns of thought and structure. He offers the reader little technical consolation – almost, it seems, as a matter of policy; and no doubt there is much to be said for this. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude, as philistine critics used to do of ‘modern’ art, that he doesn’t produce well-made poems because he can’t. On the contrary, one has the distinct sense that here is a poet who has chosen to write in his own peculiar, even rebarbative way because an inner poetic logic demands that he do so. It goes without saying that his oblique and perhaps innovative purposes are to be taken entirely seriously – though I’m happy to report that a flickering and elusive sense of fun, as of a preoccupied man suppressing manic laughter, makes an occasional and intriguing appearance.

You think I am your servant but you are wrong. The service lies with you. During your long Labours at me, I am the indulgent wood, Tolerant of your painstaking ineptitude. Your poems were torn from me by violence; I am here to receive your homage in dark silence.

Remembering the chain-saw surgery and the seaward groan, Like a bound and goaded exodus from Babylon, I pray for a wood-spirit to...

The first poem by Donald Justice I ever read was the much anthologised sestina, ‘Here in Katmandu’:

Why Brownlee left is paul Muldoon’s third book of poems, and his most interesting so far. Whereas, in the earlier books, he didn’t do a great deal more than exercise the quirky, oblique lyricism which has become his personal signature, he puts it here to the service of an idea, or complex of ideas, which constitutes a private poetry of departure. An ‘inner émigré’, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, he proposes for himself, for his father, for a childhood neighbour, real or imagined disappearing acts. This is, from one point of view, another example of the time-honoured Irish instinct to get out (generally accompanied by an obsession with the abandoned isle); and, indeed, there is the merest hint of political exasperation in one or two poems. Or perhaps ‘exasperation’ is too positive, too recognisable an emotion to ascribe to Muldoon, whose characteristic posture is one of child-like wonder in the face of multiple possibility. There is no ‘plague on both your houses’ here, but a reticence born of an inability to take sides, as in ‘The Boundary Commission’, which I quote in full:

Tonight, their simple church grown glamorous, The proud parishioners of the outlying parts Lift up their hymn-books and their hearts To please the outside-broadcast cameras. The darkness deepens; day draws to a close; A well-bred sixth-former yawns with her nose.

Outside, the hymn dies among rocks and dunes. Conflicting rhythms of the incurious sea, Not even contemptuous of these tiny tunes,...