SOURCE: Reeve, F. D. “On Shoemakers and Snails.” Poetry 170, no. 1 (April 1997): 37-51.

In the following excerpt, Reeve offers a favorable review of The Prince of the Quotidian and The Annals of Chile.

Wake Forest University Press and Farrar, Straus and Giroux teamed up to present Paul Muldoon's latest comedy in two parts, both parts now available in paper. Muldoon is a juggler, a handspringing carny, a gandydancer, a stand-up comic, an intellectual muckraker. He bends language as easily as Geller, the psychic, bent spoons. To read the little book, The Prince of the Quotidian—putatively a journal of a scribbler's month in the New Jersey suburbs (Muldoon heads Princeton's writing program)—as notes for the big, The Annals of Chile, is to interpret the work as an update of The Waste Land, a farcical, parodic translation of romance back into its roots in ritual. A cycle based on...