SOURCE: Wheatley, David. “In the Gasworks.” London Review of Books 22, no. 10 (18 May 2000): 30-1.

In the following review, Wheatley lauds To Ireland, I, Bandanna, and Muldoon's translation of Aristophanes's The Birds.

Marcel Aymé's novel Le Passemuraille, about a man who can walk through walls, would have interested Thomas Caulfield Irwin (1823-92). Irwin is cited in Paul Muldoon's To Ireland, I for a neighbourly dispute he was having with one John O'Donovan. ‘He says I am his enemy,’ Irwin wrote, ‘and watch him through the thickness of the wall which divides our houses. One of us must leave. I have a houseful of books; he has an umbrella and a revolver.’ Seasoned readers of Muldoon know all about trying to see through inscrutable partitions: for most of his career he has resisted the temptation to come out from behind his poems and explain himself in prose. Before To Ireland...