Maggot, Paul Muldoon, Faber and Faber, 128pp, £14.99 (hardback)

You know the type. He has grown his hair to look like a rock star he admires. He plays a Fender in his basement and occasionally for a band. He is obsessed with sex and violence, knows his way around Japanese kitsch-culture, has a capacious fund of obscure facts and loves to obsess about patterns that are pretty much meaningless to anyone else. Yes, the Geek is a staple type of our late twentieth, early twenty-first-century landscape. The odd thing about this one is that he is also Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton.

Ever since the publication of Madoc (1990) there has been a manic, archival, cross-referential, information-rich quality to Paul Muldoon’s poetry. That book filtered an account of Coleridge and Southey’s unrealised scheme to establish a utopia in North America through a chronological list of every major thinker since the pre-Socratics. For many this counterpoint seemed – precisely – pointless, and served only to confirm John Carey’s dismissal of Muldoon’s work as needlessly ‘packed to the gills with third- level education’. Reviewing Madoc in 1990 Michael Hofmann said that he wanted to throw it at the computer and say ‘you do it’. Other readers were more patient. A friend of mine has a copy so padded out with paper- clipped cuttings from encyclopaedias and dictionaries that it resembles a Filofax. When he presented it to Muldoon at a book-signing nary an eye-lid was batted before it came back inscribed ‘yours annotatedly, Paul’.

If The Annals of Chile (1994), Muldoon’s next book, retreated from such overt appeals to the academy, his interest in codes and systems migrated to the formal level. Its two major poems ‘Incantata’ and ‘Yarrow’ use a restricted range of rhymes that have gone on to structure important poems in later volumes. And so these books – Hay (1998), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) and Horse Latitudes (2006) – are networked with echoes, their every step forward always a doubling or tripling back. When asked where he got his ideas from W. B. Yeats, rather than evoking Celtic myth or Rosicrucian esoterica, is said to have replied ‘looking for the next rhyme’, and one intuits that the extravagant narrative leaps and bounds in Muldoon’s later work are propelled as much by sonic contingencies as by anything else. Various forms of repetition – anaphora, the refrain – have also become very important in recent years.

This kind of formal patterning continues in Maggot. Although he writes in the very first poem that he would demur from the accusation he has left the ‘straight and narrow’, there is precious little that is linear here. It is true that the reader is not necessarily conscious of the elaborate rhyme schemes stretching back across books, but the repetitions within and between poems in Maggot itself are plain enough, and the sense of a virtual web of nodes and links scintillating across its pages is palpable. I use such terms advisedly: Muldoon may have foregone the straight and narrow, but he seems to be a regular on the information highway. Google ‘Pelorus Jack’, the dolphin who guided ships through Cook’s Strait in the late nineteenth century, or ‘Topsy the Elephant’, whose death by electrocution was filmed by Edison in 1903, and compare what you find with ‘A Christmas in the Fifties’ and ‘Plan B’ respectively to see what I mean.

The thought that Muldoon might be relying on Wikipedia for his historical anecdotes is a melancholy one, and yet it is also curiously apt, for the internet has often seemed the closest analogue to his proliferating poetic. We find in both the sense of a supersaturated synchronicity, of an enormous hidden hinterland and of a propensity for endless deferral. And it is true also that, as with the internet, you do not have to go very far to get to the dark side. Narcissism, paranoia and conspiracy theories course through these poems in the same way they do cyberspace. And Maggot also returns endlessly to images of the body in extremis: dead bodies (‘The Humours of Hakone’), tortured bodies (‘Plan B’), freakish bodies (‘The Side Project’), diseased bodies (‘When the Pie was Opened’) and pornographic bodies (‘Balls’, ‘Maggot’). With both the web and Muldoon’s poems it is as if the formal abstractions of their habitual procedures, their frictionless, algorithmic movements, seek to ground themselves by way of compensation in the materiality of pained or pleasured flesh.

And yet this is only half the story, for Muldoon has always insisted that the abstraction of art is also constantly in flight from the suffering, violated body, even while dependent upon it. This is where the legacy of the Northern Irish Troubles can still be detected in his work. Several poems here, notably ‘When the Pie was Opened’, ‘A Mayfly’, ‘Lord Byron’s Maggot’ and ‘The Sod Farm’ meditate on the relationship between poetry and violence. Thus the latter describes the skin of a woman suffering third degree burns: ‘Her gauze-wrapped arms/now taking in unending variations/and surprises: temples, grottoes,/waterfalls, ruins, leafy glades/ with sculpture, and such features/as would set off the imagination/on journeys in time as well as space’. The arms are covered in gauze, but the poem still manages to aestheticise the pattern of the burns beneath, converting the woman’s pain into a picturesque landscape. This landscape then becomes the basis for journeys in time and space, a phrase which, like the poem’s earlier reference to ‘unending variations’ might describe the procedures of Maggot itself. And yet the deliberate flatness of the last two lines, together with the cod-Romanticism of the landscape the burns inspire, ironises the poem’s confidence. This becomes clearer when we note that the finest poem in the volume, ‘The Humours of Hakone’, again mentions a temple, but in much more negative terms: ‘the body of a poem is no less sacred than a temple with its banner gash//though both stink to high heaven’. The deployment of the cliché in the last line is entirely typical, and perfectly judged, allowing Muldoon to register art’s attempt to transcend the material world while insisting that this urge cannot be sundered from the stink of the sublunary.

Despite Muldoon’s reputation as a playful, postmodern prodigy, this suspicion of the aesthetic aligns him rather with another, more critical, Modernist tradition. And the wariness permeates the volume in other ways too. Maggot’s ludic to-and-fro of rhyme, repetition and allusion, what one poem calls its ‘rounds and roundelays’, often has an automatic, auto-pilot quality to it. The voices that speak these poems seem at some level to be caught up in idiotic, impersonal, linguistic machines whose only purpose is simply to exhaust the available permutations. As ‘The Hummingbird’ has it there is often a sense of ‘an engine rolling on after a crash’. This is especially true of the title poem, but also of ‘Lines for the Centenary of the Birth of Samuel Beckett’. The divergent examples of Joyce and Beckett often hover over the most ambitious Irish writing. Although Muldoon’s poetry is routinely allied to a Joycean exuberance, it may be that a Beckettian concern with death, repetition and the absurdities of the body is where its heart lies.