SOURCE: Norfolk, Lawrence. “The Abundant Braes of Yarrow.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4775 (7 October 1994): 32-3.

In the following review, Norfolk compliments The Annals of Chile, drawing attention to the poem “Yarrow” as an example of Muldoon's complex and ambitious verse.

Paul Muldoon is one of the most inventive and ambitious poets working today. The Annals of Chile is his best book to date.

Such an endorsement, in fact any unequivocal statement, does not affix itself easily to Muldoon, any more than straightforward criticism has to his poetry. His work is oddly ungraspable and Muldoon himself is difficult to place; hipper than Heaney, but junior to him and a less obvious candidate for the canon. He is more fun than most of the Northern Ireland poets, but that is because he has not written enough about The Troubles. He is formidably erudite, for which read “too clever by half.” Critical...