Horse Latitudes is an uncomfortable book, spatially speaking. Although Paul Muldoon’s latest collection is full of geographical references we are frequently made to feel that the world is very small, tied together in disquieting ways. Despite the poet’s reputation as an academic prankster and mock-pedant, in which he charmingly revelled in his recent reading at York, there is no mistaking the darkening tone of these poems. Here death is a major concern, and it is everywhere, inescapable.
In the opening sonnet sequence, battlefields as distant as “Beijing” and “Bannockburn” are made neighbours, linked by alliteration, associations with violence and the enigmatic presence of “Carlotta”, who has her own battle to fight, against cancer. In this sequence of nineteen, however, the reader cannot help but postulate a twentieth–powerful in its absence: Baghdad. This unwritten poem still feels startlingly visible, as though it were only half-submerged within the rest of the sequence, as in “Blackwater Fort”, where topical allusions suddenly break the surface:

“Why,” Carlotta wondered, “the House of Tar?
Might it have to do with the gross
imports of crude oil Bush will come clean on
only when the Tigris comes clean?”

As Muldoon himself has remarked, these poems were begun “as the US embarked on its foray into Iraq” and they can in part be read as a comment on the stagnation of American culture and policy under Bush. This ability to interrogate culture, transcending meaningless lyricism, is one of Muldoon’s most valuable qualities as a modern poet. So many lesser poets shy away from the “big issues” that, however dark his mood, Muldoon’s voice will always be refreshing. This first sequence of poems seems to link public and private themes very successfully.
In other poems of the collection the sense of spatial discomfort becomes greater: even the borders between past and present seem to have been dismantled. With Muldoon’s consciousness apparently awkwardly positioned between contemporary America and the Ireland of his youth, the simplest actions may abruptly open the door to another place, as in “Eggs”:

I was unpacking a dozen eggs
into the fridge when I noticed a
hairline crack
at which I pecked
till at long last I squeezed
into a freshly whitewashed
scullery in Cullenramer…

Here, the dividing line between past and present, and Ireland and America, is imagined as just “a hairline crack”: but memory is seen as more painful and more problematic than a Proustian moment of epiphany. The image of “squeez[ing]” in particular, as well as the underlying metaphor of the return to the egg/womb, which is made explicit in the closing lines of the poem, suggests that this movement is far from normal nostalgia, instead it is viewed as a regression, in truth a rather disturbing one. Equally, the frequent appearances of horses in these poems add to this sense of spatial unease, as the traditional associations of horses with Ireland, coupled with the definition of Horse Latitudes given on the flyleaf to the book as “an area north and south of the equator in which ships tend to become becalmed, in which stasis, if not stagnation is the order of the day”, suggests that although Muldoon has not lived in his birth-country for many years, regression and stagnation is something that he remains concerned about in his relations with Ireland. Both America and Ireland thus seem, in Muldoon’s middle age, to be equally confining and unsatisfactory.
Reflecting this, the collection is often somewhat claustrophobic, perhaps due in no small part to Muldoon’s taut virtuosity with form. When this virtuosity really works it is breathtaking. Traditional forms such as villanelle, haiku or riddle are slightly tweaked so that even the most serious readers of poetry become too caught up in the movement of the lines to bother identifying the form. An example of this is the excellent modern pantoum (a form where lines two and four of stanza one become one and three of stanza two, and so on), “The Mountain Is Holding Out”:

The mountain is holding out for news from the sea
of the raid on the redoubt.
The plain won’t level with me
for news from the sea
is harder and harder to find.
The plain won’t level with me
now it’s non-aligned
and harder and harder to find …

But it doesn’t always work out as comfortably convenient as this. The tight, patterned repetitions and full rhymes of “The Old Country” are playfully used along with cliché, in order to reflect the cultural stagnation and linguistic dysphasia of Ireland:

Where every town was a tidy town
and every garden a hanging garden.
A half could be had for half a crown.
Every major artery would harden
since every meal was a square meal.

and no doubt Muldoon had a lot of fun writing it. But, after a certain point, reading it becomes uncomfortable, almost unbearable: the lines close around you like a cage. Although this is no doubt intentional, at the York reading Muldoon himself knew not to read the whole thing (13 sections in all) at once, choosing instead to read shorter passages. The poet’s approach of internal conversation often produces a similar claustrophobic effect, making one wonder if all the different spaces in these poems are not merely essentially within his own head. All of this is, however, not criticism as such; instead it seems to be part of Muldoon’s conception of the postmodern condition. Still, what really redeems this collection is not a statement of the postmodern condition–or even the creative pyrotechnics of “90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore”. It is Muldoon’s skill as an elegist, in which he has perhaps come to surpass even Heaney. The truly memorable “Turkey Buzzards”, written for Muldoon’s terminally ill sister Maureen (to whom the book is dedicated), achieves an intimate, regretful tone, balanced deftly between the sublime and the prosaic. “Sillyhow Stride”, another elegy, this time for Warren Zevon, mingles responses to the deaths of his friend and his sister in order to create something more visceral, angry and anguished, hinting at our culture’s own self-destructiveness:

…I knelt and adjusted the silly how
of her oxygen mask, its vinyl caul
unlikely now to save Maureen from drowning in her own spit.
I thought of how the wrangling schools
need look no further than her bed
to find what fire shall burn this world.

Perhaps Horse Latitudes is a difficult, claustrophobic collection: there is undeniably an air of aesthetic midlife crisis about it. But it is also touchingly passionate; a work of anger and distress, which still achieves, despite it all, a sense of the power and the playfulness of language.

Horse Latitudes. Paul Muldoon. 80pp. Faber. £14.99. 0-57-123234-5 (hardback)