[Mules] will frustrate those wishing Northern Irish poets to lacerate their souls on the bloody realities of Ulster, for in the collection's first poem, "Lunch with Pancho Villa," Muldoon lets a "celebrated pamphleteer" berate the poet-narrator:

         'Look, son. Just look around you.
         People are getting themselves killed
         Left, right and centre
         While you do what? Write rondeaux?
         There's more living in this country
         Than stars and horses, pigs and trees,
         Not that you'd guess it from your poems.
         Do you never listen to the news?
         You want to get down to something true,
         Something a little nearer home.'

While the poet-narrator has not much more success than Stephen Dedalus in "Aeolus" in answering the seductive call of political journalism in this poem, the answer is clearer, though still oblique, in "The Centaurs," "The Narrow Road to the North," and "Armageddon, Armageddon." In "The Centaurs" not only William...