SOURCE: Kitchen, Judith. “Tensions.” Georgia Review 53, no. 2 (summer 1999): 368-84.

In the following excerpt, Kitchen praises Muldoon's verse in Hay, though finds the collection inferior to his previous volume, The Annals of Chile.

It's early morning. I'm sitting in a corner window on the thirty-fifth floor of a hotel in San Francisco. Outside, nothing but fog, saving me from my own strong fear of heights. Where yesterday I could look out on city streets, moving lights, water in the distance, today there is nothing. No little cat feet, but a dense gray wall of impenetrability. Though if I should go down in the elevator and walk out the door, I could move through it easily enough.

Suddenly, a whir in front of me, and a wire mesh cage holding two men appears from above. They move past and disappear; I only know they are there because the ropes outside...