Hay, by Paul Muldoon

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 224 pages, $22

The Irish are well known, rightly or wrongly, for the gift of speech; improvisation and fantasy, it seems, characterize what we think we know as typical Irish tales, prayers, plays, novels, and poems. Poetry will not expire while the Irish continue to write it, as the work of Seamus Heaney and his contemporaries -- Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon, among others -- attests.

Hay is Muldoon's eighth book of poems, and it is a natural successor to the innovations of The Annals of Chile and Quoof. In his earlier work, Muldoon proved adept at yoking together the contrary influences of his own background -- the Catholic and Republican sympathies of his father's people and the high-toned, ultra-English assumptions of the BBC, where he worked for many years. Now his view has expanded to take in a longer perspective on the shared cultural and religious experience of the West and its uneasy place in contemporary life. In "The Mudroom," for example, the poet places himself and the reader simultaneously within the sacred history of Israel and in the mudroom of his own house in contemporary New Jersey:

. . . I drove another piton into an eighty pound
bag of Sakrete and flipped the half door on the dairy cabinet
of the old Hotpoint . . .
and saw, once and for all, the precarious
blue-green, pine-ash path along which Isaac followed Abraham.

Similar in effect is the closing sequence of the book ("The Bangle [Slight Return]"), where the speaker is at once Virgil contemplating his creation of Dido in the Aeneid and Muldoon himself, at ease in a saloon.

With these feints, Muldoon takes on the wild-eyed energy of a pub storyteller, fixing you with his eye as he attempts to show you the perfect logic of utter improbabilities; it makes for invigorating poetry. In Muldoon's America, all times are one, and the Ireland of legend has reality. Like medieval artists who delighted in compressing the whole of a saint's life into a single timeless frame, Muldoon believes in the simultaneity of deep experience, as in the touching "White Shoulders":

My heart is heavy. For I saw Fionnuala,
"The Gem of the Roe," "The Flower of Sweet Strabane,"
when a girl reached down into a freezer bin
to bring up my double scoop of vanilla.

Muldoon is an almost frantically ingenious craftsman: this collection includes not only couplets, concrete poems, translations, and his own variations on obsessive forms (including a poem rhymed all on a single word), but an irregular sonnet sequence and a verse diary composed of rhyming haiku. That eccentric stylist Amanda McKittrick Ros (not incidentally, a countrywoman of Muldoon's) once titled a collection of her verse Poems of Puncture, and Muldoon has reinvented rhyming in such a way that his poems might be called "poems that puncture." Such, certainly, is the effect of "the froufrous, the fripperies, the Fallopian/tubes of a dead cow in the Philippines," or "Xerxes" rhymed with "psoriasis" in "Throwback." Muldoon's mischievous wit punctures the self-seriousness of poetry as it punctures our false expectations of ourselves. His richest invention here, however, lies not in his sleight-of-hand rhyming, but in the broader innovation of "Sleeve Notes," a long sequence of imaginary, memoiristic responses to albums by the likes of the Beatles, Warren Zevon, Blondie, and Dire Straits: "There was that time the archangel ran his thumb along the shelf/and anointed, it seemed, his own brow with soot."

A poet of such energy necessarily throws off countless sparks. Muldoon, who has always had a remarkable ability to make hay from the ordinary grass of experience, consistently turns Hay into the fire of poetry.