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Paul Muldoon, Quoof, Faber, £4.00

In Samuel Beckett's Watt, the narrator describes how one afternoon the comfortable tedium of his existence is troubled by the arrival of two men who say they have come 'to choon the piano', an event which Watt describes as 'of great formal brilliance but indeterminate purport'. Ever since his first volume, New Weather (1973), Paul Muldoon has troubled readers in this way. In his review of Mules (1977), Seamus Heaney faced the problem, concluding that Muldoon was 'one of the best' by virtue of his formal skills and his concern with language, and that the question of what the poetry was about was not the right one to ask. Why Brownlee Left (1980) enhanced the poet's reputation as one of the best, developing farther the mixture of formal clarity and hermetic content, and expanding the pattern of a series of short poems ending with a long one (in that case a very long one, 'Immram') which echoed and brought together many of the images and words of the rest of the volume. In Brownlee the tightening effect of this was more intellectually satisfying than before (although I think 'Armageddon, Armageddon', the series with which Mules ends, is a much finer achievement than the provocative, sardonic 'Immram'), even if the precise connections being made were not always clear. To take one example, the bizarre religion described in 'Immram', The Way of the One Wave, celebrates a wave that was 'sky-high, like a wall of glass', recalling 'The Boundary Commission' where the Northern Irish border crossed Golightly's lane so artificially 'It might have been a wall of glass': recalling it, though, with indeterminate purport.

Quoof keeps to these established practices, but uses them very much more tightly. Although fewer of the poems than in Mules and Brownlee might recommend themselves to the anthologist at first reading (`The Right Arm', `The Sightseers' and the title-poem are exceptions perhaps), the volume as a whole is better integrated, principally because of the brilliantly successful long final poem, 'The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants'. Twice as long as `Immram' (687 lines, made up of 49 para-sonnets plus the last word 'Huh.'), and 'loosely based on the Trickster cycle of the Winnebago Indians' (if you can believe the blurb: you can't believe everything in a Muldoon package), this poem is a grim comic exercise constructed around grisly and violent events from recent Northern Irish history, intercut with drug-visions: Kerouac to 'Immram's' Chandler. It oscillates sharply between cold, restrained pathos and hilarious formal spoofing; what doesn't vary is the poem's capacity to disconcert. It again picks up ideas and words from the earlier poems, and extends even farther back to bring together many of the obsessive images found throughout Muldoon's work since 'Thrush' in New Weather: hands above all, wood, yellow stains, American Indians, the 'familiar quick-set damson hedges'. The linkage it provides sometimes has great moment: the poems ends with an explosion and severed hands, evoking the cut off fists that came 'blattering' at the window in 'The Hands', as well as the imagined hand metaphorically offered by the dead father in the previous poem, 'The Mir¬ror' ('I'll give you a hand, here'): recalling too the poet staring at his own hand at the end both of 'Armageddon' in Mules and of 'Thrush'. At other times the poem illustrates the kind of comic tics that Muldoon's imagination delights in. The protagonist Gallogly (the Irish version of the word 'gallowglass' for mercenary soldier: here typically glossed 'otherwise known as Golightly,/ otherwise known as Ingoldsby,/ otherwise known as English', by a series of as-sonantal leaps) is on the run, and he meets `you' as you come back from the night shift:

          He's sporting your
          Donegal tweed suit and your
          Sunday shoes and politely raises your 
          hat as he goes by.

'All a bit much', as the poem says (and note the free variation on the sonnet rhyme-scheme); but the surprise is as much in the syntax as in the event, in a manner favoured by Muldoon:

          Do you remember me, Cass,
          The brim of his hat over my face,
          My father's slicker trailing the ground

                                              ('Cass and Me', Mules)

But in Quoof the cross-referring and associations work in a controlled fashion, far beyond mental quirkiness. To take one instance: in a haunting line of the first poem, 'Gathering Mushrooms', the poet's father 'reaches far into his own shadow'. In 'From Strength to Strength', sixteen pages later, the Charolais heifer-calf 'will plunge out of her own shadow / as if from the bath'. And in the next poem, 'Cherish the Ladies', the circuit of images is welded together as, in his 'last poem about my father', we see the father filling a galvanised bath for the heifers to drink. It is a technique of symbolism, familiar in Yeats, in which the literal part of the symbol refuses to be burnt up: at the beginning of 'The Tower', 'decrepit age' is bitterly attached to the poet 'As to a dog's tail', to reappear several lines later as 'A sort of battered kettle at the heel'; or the developed `emblem' of the swan in 'Coole Park and Bally-lee, 1931' which is first said to be 'like the soul' and, after moving away from this simile, finally returns to it obliquely to clinch the identification:

          So arrogantly pure, a child might think 
          It can be murdered with a spot of ink.

The comparison with Yeats bears labouring because many of the fragmentary associative techniques in Quoof are reminiscent of the symbolist tradition traced in Kermode's The Romantic Image — the tradition of Mallarme, perhaps. Image, object and idea work together into an uncertain whole, in the way they do in the mind.

This suggests at least part of the answer to the question of what Muldoon's poetry is about. In Quoof, more clearly than in the earlier books, the concern is with the way personal memory, sense experience and language compete for the attention of the conscious mind. The process is not ratiocinative but symbolist and visionary. There are visions of many kinds in the book: the traditional Irish Aisling dream-poem, or the 'Trance' induced by a poignant memory, or the states brought about by hallucinogenic fungi. Mushrooms are insistently recurrent in Muldoon's Quoof because they provide the link between vision as heightened awareness and visionary memory, represented mostly here by his father's mushroom-farming. The visions are symbolic representations (like Joyce's Epiphanies) of the way words and experience come to inform the mind; despite a number of crass biographical readings of some of these poems as descriptions of drug-trips or amorous adventures, Muldoon's visions are no more an end in themselves than those in Dante or Piers Plowman. The title-poem (quoof is the 'family word for the hot water bottle') shows this with great economy where the same excitement is claimed for the experience of new language as for sex, and the apocalyptic grandiosity of the end of Yeats's visionary 'The Second Coming' is parodied (but quietly paralleled too) by 'some other shy beast/ that has yet to enter the language'.

The poem that most intriguinely encapsulates Muldoon's visionary method is 'The Right Arm' (it is also perhaps the most appealing at first reading). It begins with the narrator, aged 'threeish', plunging his arm into a sweet-jar in the family's general shop in a place called Eglish:

          I would give my right arm to have known then 
          how Eglish was itself wedged between
          ecclesia and église.

The tenses are disconcerting: why would I give my right arm (now) to have known 'then' what is, on the face of it, a fact about language? This uncertainty is confirmed at the end:

          The Eglish sky was its own stained-glass vault 
          and my right arm was sleeved in glass
          that has yet to shatter.

The poem unmistakably, if obscurely, suggests the continuity and discontinuity of experience at the same time: what is known or not, and what is believed or not. The temporal point of vantage is used in this shifting way throughout the book.

For all its difficulties, Quoof is unfailingly suggestive and enjoyable. And it is hard not to sound over-solemn in evaluating this poetry, as the poet taunts you into praising the formal brilliance which has its reductio ad absurdum in, for instance, setting out the half-jingle 'Just throw him a cake of Sunlight soap, let him wash himself ashore' as a sonnet. Since there are only thirteen words, 'himself' has to be divided across two lines to make up the fourteen. In 'The Sightseers' the sonnet rhymes 'Ballygawley ' with 'Ballygawley': a perfect rhyme indeed (and yet a real perfect rhyme because the two incidents in which the name occurs are so dif¬ferent: one innocent, the other grim and near-lethal). In the end the reader is left exasperated and exhilarated at the same time because, like Christopher Reid, Muldoon stimulates an appetite which he never satisfies directly, never drawing a conclusion and often offering an ending which is the equivalent of a cold shower ('Huh!'). Intellectual expectancy is left in a state of arousal. But there is a great deal of cru¬cial substance too (more than in the earlier volumes). The I.R.A. hunger strikes hover in the imagination, always ready to break in on the imagery (as in Heaney's 'Ugolino' or Tom Paulin's Liberty Tree):

          Beyond this concrete wall is a wall of concrete 
          and barbed wire. Your only hope
          is to come back ...

          lie down with us now and wrap
          yourself in the soiled grey blanket of Irish rain

                                                     ('Gathering Mushrooms')

The oblique method of Quoof suggests understanding better than a more direct statement might. To mention Yeats for the last time: C.L. Wrenn said that everyone regarded Responsibilities in 1914 as a great falling-off from what had gone before. In the same way Quoof, in spite of its humour, is a movement towards a greater intensity and seriousness, even if it lacks the finished polish of some of the poems in Mules and Brownlee. If this pattern of development is sustained, Muldoon's Wild Swans at Coole will be more than one of the best.