Paul Muldoon as a lecturer! Well, then we'll catch him at last. Muldoon has been for many years the most elusive of the major mainstream poets, but no butterfly escapes from a lecture hall; somewhere above the old podium and the sweating water glass and the black chair emblazoned with the gold university logo is a net which is destined to fall. For a lecture is a heavy, cohesive, sequential, and obvious thing, requiring of its deliverer that he move from A to D without skipping to F or reversing B and C, and for a poet used to reshuffling the alphabet as he pleases, the straightforward plod may wear out all his nimbleness. His tricks will no longer help him; if he has a mind, we will see it. He does not want us to see it, of course; he wants to tell us about Emily Dickinson, and looking out at a hundred pairs of eyes waiting to pin him to styrofoam he may feel a bead of moisture roll down his temple in a line that moves rather like one of his poems. For we have no interest in Emily Dickinson. We are already acquainted with her. It is about the lecturer himself that we go to find things out.

Had we been at Oxford, however, on the fifteen evenings when Paul Muldoon delivered these talks, we might have seen a rare instance of the fox outmaneuvering the hounds. For The End of the Poem manages the trick; Muldoon comes to the front of the stage, taps the microphone twice, and disappears. His lectures appear to be lectures—they are verifiably in a prose medium, and pay the proper respect to alphabetical order—but they are really almost poems; they translate the movements of Muldoon's poetic imagination into something like lecture form. They are obsessed with anagrams, strange codes, etymologies, and homonyms; they make bizarre forays into psychobiography; they keep a sharp lookout for any means by which a writer's unconscious might make itself known. We spend time with Yeats and automatic writing, Sylvia Plath and the Ouija board, H.D., and Sigmund Freud. One lecture claims that the key to Frost's poem "The Mountain" is the fact that the word "lea" never appears in it, "Lee" being Frost's middle name. Another imagines a Bloomian agon between Ted Hughes and Marianne Moore.

It will be argued that the lecturer, so far from unwittingly revealing himself, has begun to toy with us, that these lectures, with their eccentric allusions and loops of self-reference, are parodic or deliberately absurd. But insincerity has never been Muldoon's method, any more than sincerity has been his tone. I suspect that he means much more of what he says here than we might at first think, but that he is deploying his own thoughts in such a way as to make us aware of the idiosyncrasy of any attempt to discern the intentions of poets—showing in a sense that conventional criticism is as slippery and capricious as conventional criticism has always found his poems. Muldoon's idea of the "end of the poem"—"end" meaning at various times conclusion, imaginary limit, and purpose in the world—finally comes to rest in the thought that this sort of recreation of intention is a vital part of reading: "The poem is, after all, the solution to a problem only it has raised, and our reading of it necessarily entails determining what that problem was." But since this process is inevitably speculative, it also means that the reader creates the writer, that we can bring to reading anything we like, that the poem has no end. And in fact an extraordinary number of the lectures in The End of the Poem seem to spring (though this is never mentioned) from moments in Muldoon's own verse. He writes about Marianne Moore's use of otter imagery, at what must have been around the time he was writing his poem "The Otter." He writes about translations of Montale's "The Eel," without alluding to his own translation of the same poem. He writes about Frost's middle name and "The Mountain," when his own poem "The Country Club" joins Frost's middle name to the name of Frost's high school in a character called Lee Pinkerton, and promptly quotes "The Mountain" at him. And that was thirty years ago! If the poem has an end, it is clearly in no hurry to reach it.

Speaking of poems, Muldoon has a new book of those out as well: Horse Latitudes, which is less interesting, because less singular, than The End of the Poem—Muldoon has published ten poetry collections, but only one other book of lectures—but more interesting because, after all, it is a book of poems. Horse Latitudes is also easier to characterize. If The End of the Poem suffers at times from an aggravated puckishness, so that it too often threatens to dazzle us to death, Horse Latitudes is simply a splendid book, full of deep wit, intelligent form, and Muldoon's usual crafty uncertainties. The title refers to a section of the ocean which is unusually calm, "where stasis (if not stagnation) is the order of the day," and the book explores stillness and stalled progress on various levels of the political (a sonnet sequence in which each sonnet is named after a battle beginning with B, with Baghdad conspicuously missing) and the personal (a terrific poem about Tithonous, the character from mythology who was given eternal life but not eternal youth). At the level of language the theme appears in two ways: in the book's preoccupation with cliché, the form of stagnant speech, and in its use of repetition as a structuring device. These elements have appeared in Muldoon's work before—"Symposium," from Hay, feels like a dry run for much of Horse Latitudes—but here they reach some sort of apogee. This is most apparent in the brilliant sonnet sequence "The Old Country," which uses a series of returning clichés to undermine a nostalgic vision of Irish history:

Every slope was a slippery slope
where every shave was a very close shave
and money was money for old rope
where every grave was a watery grave.

And the final poem of the book, a long elegy for the musician Warren Zevon, brings back lines and forms from the earlier poems. Muldoon has often used this device in the long poems that conclude his collections, but here, when so many of the poems repeat themselves so baroquely already, it feels especially, and appropriately, intricate.

Like all Muldoon's books, these two have exasperating moments. The writer's intelligence stays a step ahead of us, like an usher in some strange theater where you never find your seat; and whether this is pleasurable or simply wearisome can depend excessively on secondary effects—whether the sounds are pleasing, or the anecdotes funny, for instance. But when Muldoon is at his best he is one of the most exhilarating of all living poets. Even when he befuddles or frustrates us, he leaves us with a not unpleasant Farmer MacGregorish feeling that we have witnessed an astonishing feat, and had some of our vegetables go missing. And far more often he has nothing in common with that other famous escape artist; he leaves us with more than he takes.

— Brian Phillips