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    Maggot: Poems
    Maggot: Poems
    Maggot: Poems
    Ebook130 pages1 hour

    Maggot: Poems

    By Paul Muldoon

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    About this ebook

    Of Plan B, an interim volume that included several of the poems in Maggot, Robert McCrum recently said in the London Observer that "Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet's task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection." In his eleventh full-length book, Muldoon reminds us that he is a traditional poet who is steadfastly at odds with tradition. If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn't your father's poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W. B. Yeats's remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are "sex and the dead," Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It's no accident that the centerpiece of Maggot is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its subject the urge to memorialize the scenes of fatal automobile accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title sequence but also many of the round songs that characterize Maggot, and has led Angela Leighton, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, to see these new poems as giving readers "a thrilling, wild, fairground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateAug 5, 2014
    ISBN9781429964883
    Maggot: Poems
    Author

    Paul Muldoon

    Paul Muldoon is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Moy Sand and Gravel, Hay, and The Annals of Chile, among other noteworthy poetry collections. A former Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, he is currently Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

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      Book preview

      Maggot - Paul Muldoon

      PLAN B

      I

      On my own head be it if, after the years of elocution and

      pianoforte,

      the idea that I may have veered

      away from the straight

      and narrow of Brooklyn or Baltimore for a Baltic state

      is one at which, all things being equal, I would demur.

      A bit like Edward VII cocking his ear

      at the mention of Cork. Yet it seems I’ve managed nothing more

      than to have fetched up here.

      II

      To have fetched up here in Vilna—the linen plaids,

      the amber, the orange-cap boletus

      like a confession extorted from a birch,

      the foot-wide pedestal upon which a prisoner would perch

      on one leg in the former KGB headquarters

      like a white stork

      before tipping into a pool of icy water,

      to be reinstated more than once by a guard with a pitchfork.

      III

      It was with a pitchfork they prodded Topsy, the elephant

      that killed her keeper on Coney Island

      when he tried to feed her a lit cigarette,

      prodded her through Luna Park in her rain-heavy skirt

      to where she would surely have been hanged by the neck

      had the ASPCA not got themselves into such a lather

      and Thomas Edison arrived in the nick

      of time to greet the crowd he’d so long hoped to gather.

      IV

      I myself have been trying to gather the dope

      from a KGB surveillance tape

      on the Chazon Ish, the wisest Jew alive, a master of the

      catchall

      clause who was known to cudgel

      his brains in a room high in a Vilna courtyard

      on the etymology of dork

      while proposing that the KGB garotte

      might well be a refinement of the Scythian torc.

      V

      The Scythian torc had already been lent a new lease

      of life as the copper wire with which Edison would splice

      Topsy to more than 6,000 volts of alternating current,

      though not before he’d prepared the ground

      with a boatload of carrots laced with cyanide.

      This was 1903. The year in which Edward VII paid

      out a copper line from his mustachioed snout

      to the electric chair where Edison himself was now belayed.

      VI

      Now a belayed, bloody prisoner they’ve put on the spot

      and again and again zapped

      is the circus rider on a dappled

      croup from which he’s more than once toppled

      into the icy water, spilling his guts

      about how his grandfather had somehow fetched up in Cork

      straight from the Vilna ghetto,

      having misheard, it seems, Cork for "New

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