SOURCE: Wills, Clair. “Introduction.” In Reading Paul Muldoon, pp. 9-23. Great Britain: Bloodaxe Books, 1998.

In the following essay, Wills provides an overview of Muldoon's poetic style, his personal and intellectual perspective, and critical approaches to his work.

What makes a poem by Paul Muldoon a Muldoon poem? Muldoon is at once the most characterful of contemporary poets, and the most elusive. There's a distinctive Muldoonian (or should it be Muldoonesque?) ring to his work which may be easy to spot, and even to imitate, but is perhaps less easy to define. Take the following poem, ‘Twice,’ which appeared in Muldoon's seventh poetry collection, The Annals of Chile, published in 1994:

It was so cold last night the water in the barrel grew a sod of water: I asked Taggart and McAnespie to come over and we sawed and sawed for half an hour until, using a crowbar as a...