SOURCE: Lucas, John. “Escape Artist.” New Statesman 114, no. 2943 (21 August 1987): 23-4.

In the following excerpt, Lucas compliments Muldoon's poetic techinques in Meeting the British, calling the collection “the best of his five full volumes of poetry.”

Like its predecessors, Paul Muldoon's new volume, Meeting the British, is full of poems whose real subject seems to be how to write a poem. I don't at all mean that Muldoon apes those old-new American writers whose only subject was poetry (didn't they do any living?); the point is rather that a Muldoon poem invariably has a canny, almost wittily defiant air about it, a manner of implying that neither it nor its author will allow themselves to be docketted as this or that kind of Irish performance.

And yet, paradoxically, Muldoon's poems are wonderfully adroit performances, whose absorbed perceptions and habits can feel close to aesthetic heartlessness but only, perhaps, to...