Paul Muldoon's third collection [Why Brownlee Left] is as humane, ingenious and formally skilful as one would expect after New Weather and Mules, and just a mite disappointing. The poems here show (and sometimes show off) his quirky, offbeat talent for sudden revelatory flights from mundane contexts. At the close of 'Whim' the man, making love to a woman in the Botanic Gardens, gets literally stuck into her…. Here again are many examples of childhood recollection and the anecdotal, and the complete inability to resist a crafty pun: 'There is such splendour in the grass / I might be the picture of happiness' ('Promises, Promises'). I don't get from many of these new poems much sense of Muldoon extending himself beyond, rather than refining the virtues of, his earlier work, where he found very early a distinctively wry and deceptively simple-sophisticated lyric voice. Yet there are many things to...