Paul Muldoon

[Steph#2]

It maybe just the mood I’m in, but I’ve just read this poem and it kinda choked me up. I think it’s the sense of a dark premonition that the image of the absent father creates that does it. I can imagine, through this poem, what it must be like to wake up one morning and find the person you most love and admire has vanished with no explanation.

Does anyone else think it’s a good poem?

The Waking Father

My father and I are catching spricklies
out of the Oona river.
They have us feeling righteous,
the way we have thrown them back.
Our benevolence is astounding.

When my father stood out in the shallows
it occurred to me that
the spricklies might have been piranhas,
the river a red carpet
rolling out from where he just stood.

Or I wonder now if he is dead or sleeping.
For if he is dead I would have his grave
secret and safe,
I would turn the river out of its course,
Lay him in his bed, bring it round again.

No one would question
that he had treasures or his being a king,
telling me of the real fish farther down.

[romac]

I think it’s a very good poem.

Muldoon published this in his first collection in 1973 when he was only 21 years old. Several of the poems in it were composed while he was still at school – an astonishing achievement. He was / is sickeningly talented.

I’ve also read his latest collection Moy Sand and Gravel – it’s excellent, with some brilliant off-kilter sestinas, and an amazing 20 page poem to finish, inspired by Yeats’s “A Prayer for my Daughter”.

I liked A Waking Father because of the very moving way Muldoon articulates the child’s imagination, and for the faintly surreal imagery, the deliberate ambiguity in the language (e.g. the “red carpet” of S2), and the great last line. It’s the kind of poem that is always a pleasure to re-read.

Thanks
Rob

[SarahJF]

Hello Steph#2,

I'm enjoying reading it, too. Thank-you for posting it. I haven't read much Paul Muldoon, apart from in bookshop browses, where I've found him patchy (for which read - the poem was to complicated for me to be able to get into it in five minutes, so I browsed on - a compliment, really).

I do, really, like that one. The mixture of closeness/ tiny reality, and huge vast wonderings.

The poem I knew, and liked, of his is:

Quoof

How often have I carried our family word
for the hot water bottle
to a strange bed,
as my father would juggle a red-hot half-brick
in an old sock
to his childhood settle.
I have taken it into so many lovely heads
Or laid it between us like a sword.
An hotel room in New York City
with a girl who spoke hardly any English,
my hand on her breast
like the smouldering one-off spoor of the yeti
or some other shy beast
that has as yet to enter the language.

I think Quoof is gorgeous. So clever, but so near. And so true. Another wonderful, wonderful ending, too, I've just realised, as has The waking father. I think I'm going to have to save up for some Muldoon.


Sarah

[Steph#2]

Here is the first of Muldoon’s poems which lodged itself permanently in my brain:

Why Brownlee left

Why Brownlee left, and where he went,
Is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content
It was him; two acres of barley,
One of potatoes, four bullocks,
A milker, a slated farmhouse.
He was last seen going out to plough
On a March morning, bright and early.

By noon Brownlee was famous;
They had found all abandoned, with
The last rig unbroken, his pair of black
Horses, like man and wife,
Shifting their weight from foot to
Foot, and gazing into the future.

I don’t know of anyone else who could include “bright and early” and “gazing into the future” with such devastating effect. It’s interesting that he includes such well known phrases in many of his poems, but he does so in such a way as to imbue them with a terrifying irony, or such absolute accuracy, that they soar above the common-place.

Why are all the good poets Irish?

Steph