Joy in Service on Rue Tagore

by Paul Muldoon

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024

Paul Muldoon has been writing poetry at the crossroads of tradition and invention for more than fifty years. Compared to most of what currently passes poetic muster—so much that is shapeless and unmusical but vaguely stanzaic, though not even always that—reading Muldoon feels downright miraculous. Just one of his pieces is often enough to restore your sense of how a poem might still be read: with certain expectations as to the artful assimilation of not only sound and sense but of rhyme and meter.

Muldoon may look nothing like the elusive, deep-sea goblin shark, but make no mistake: he, too, is a kind of living fossil. His work feels miraculous precisely because so few poets anymore do what he does (and whether they can or they can’t—could it really be a matter of deteriorating faculties rather than willful artlessness?—most of them don’t). And that’s too bad, because reading him is, in part, realizing all the reasons we gave up on poetry; it’s realizing, for example, that our general distaste for the stuff of the past is little more than an impatience with old, hard words and their painful arrangements. Rhyme has never caused a reader trouble. That a poet’s duty to meter once entailed a readiness to break the backs of perfectly straightforward statements—gnarling syntax to clear the way for a march of iambs, say—is a duty Muldoon’s poems tend to disobey. He routinely returns to forms that were in when the western world was ruled by kings but fills them up with words we use, and doesn’t tend to puzzle us about the order of things; he hears rhymes everywhere, yet, far from old-fashioned, he manages a freer line than the next ten free-verse aficionados combined.

His latest collection, Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, is no exception. Like any solid poetry collection for the ages—and that’s the gist of his oeuvre—it’s also of the ages. The poems touch on several subjects—from the war in Ukraine and the stark tableaux of cemeteries to the hard white facts of snow and Winslow Homer—but Muldoon could write about anything. His relationship to poetic form is fundamentally playful. Moving through the book’s thirty-eight poems, it may not always be clear that a given piece is precisely a villanelle (or, less precisely, something like one), but this is beside the point. Now as ever, Muldoon’s poems do their paradoxical best, looking backward as much as they do forward, to straddle two worlds at once—the old not so much made new as made to feel worth returning to, the formal feeling less formal because, read aloud, it actually sounds like something said. Yet the ingredients involved are often disarmingly simple, as when he rhymes “teeth” with “peace” and “hard” with “heart.” In a narrow pile-up of a poem that seeks to reconcile Pablo Neruda to the artichoke—these are the questions poets ask!—Muldoon finds a conceptual rhyme in the former’s obsession with love and the name for the latter’s delectable, edible core:

So the career

of this vegetable

known as the “artichoke,”

a vegetable

armed to the teeth,

ends

in relative peace

after which,

plate by armor-plate,

we strip away

in delectability

and are finally able to bite down hard

on the unseasoned

essence

of its tender heart.

There’s undeniable music in these lines. If there’s a single rule at play in Rue Tagore, it’s that the reader’s ear is to be won over by any means necessary. Yet the most joy to be had—fair to expect given the title—is in the looping, contemplative drive of a poem like “The River Is a Wave,” which, classic Muldoon, a kind of abbreviated eternity, is worth copying out in its entirety:

The river is a wave that never breaks

though it may briefly surge

as it edges its way out of that three-mile-long lake

in which it’s managed to submerge

its ever so slightly diminished sense of hurt.

The river is a wave that never breaks

despite such fitful spurts

of “enthusiasm.” Let’s say, for argument’s sake,

that if it follows in its own wake

to satisfy an imperfectly remembered urge,

the river is a wave that never breaks

but is forever on the verge

of confronting an issue it’s inclined to skirt

since it’s only the sea, with its incomparable ache,

that may categorically assert

the river is a wave that never breaks.

Not all but many—a hair shy of most—of the poems in Joy in Service on Rue Tagore are just as perfectly realized. Many are available online. Try “Whilst the Ox and Ass” over at The Guardian’s website, and if you like it (if you made it this far, there’s a good chance you will), you will want to read this book.

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California.