The obscurity in Paul Muldoon's work is … evasive, and often downright teasing. He's a sophisticated high-gloss technician, managing rhyme and stanza forms with dazzling accomplishment, but the greater the verbal clarity in his poems the more puzzling they seem to become…. Quoof (the family name for a hot-water bottle), is prefaced by an account of an Eskimo shaman, and begins and ends with poems which make reference to psilocybin. This sets the tone and the scene. Throughout the book Muldoon seems intent on taking anecdote and recollection as the starting points for exercises in pushing the actual through a series of transformations, breaking them up into hallucinatory fragments.

[For Muldoon action is anything but solid], though his shapely poems give an illusion of firmness. He'll often begin with a plain statement, something vivid and recognisable (even cunningly reassuring) and go on to develop it in a manner which...