In his first book New Weather Paul Muldoon seemed to be controlling a native Irish airiness with a certain determination to be modern and realistic, but he also showed a reluctance to engage with much of the recalcitrantly unliterary stuff of modern life (so that when he mentioned 'the water that slopped / From the system he was meant / To have lagged' one could wonder momentarily if this was some unusually arcane bit of allegory). In his new book Mules there isn't much blunt banality either, and what we get instead is a fair number of historical or remotely-imagined dramatic pieces together with a general tendency to lapse into the Irishly anecdotal when other subjects fail. Muldoon's anecdotes incline towards darkly suggestive hints at mythic depths rather than spelled-out rationality, and perhaps for this reason have a way rather often of misfiring or seeming a bit of a try-on...