“Literary Dowsing”:

Maggot

“…Like the battles and deadly disease that form the focus of that series, much of 'Plan B' also centres on totalitarian suppression and torture in astonishingly perfected forms of poetry -seven poems of four couplets with intricate pararhymes -and in a highly polished language. The strong sense of death and pain in these B-verses also extend to the alliteration and structure of Muldoon's eulogy for Seamus Heaney at the 1995 Nobel Laureate's funeral in 2013.30 Muldoon can still rhyme 'a cat with a dog' and these verses serve up pairs of rhymes such as 'catchall' and 'cudgel' , 'the kgb garotte' and 'the Scythian torc' , 'cyanide' and 'paid' (6)(7). The series of seven sections in the poem are interlinked through the repetition at the start of each new section of the final line of the preceding one, a bit of a B-choice in prosody that Muldoon favours a lot in this volume, a poetic technique which perhaps takes its cue from the repetitive structure of 'The Alphabet Calendar of Amergin,' by Amergin, the first poet of Ireland.31 This aesthetic achievement begs the standard questions of play and profundity that Kennedy-Andrews summarises so concisely, to which the final lines of the seventh section provide one imaginative response: I may have put myself above all those trampled underfoot, given my perfect deportment all those years I'd skim over the dying and the dead looking up to me as if I might at any moment succumb to the book balanced on my head.…”

“…'I think one can only be faithful to the language and the way it presents itself to you,' he had told John Haffenden in 1981. 6 Muldoon upholds his reverence for language also in Maggot, and provides a rationale for one of his own watermarks in 'The Point of Poetry:' 'The urge to set down words in particular patterns is one of our most basic human impulses.' 'Rhyme is sometimes seen, improperly, as being imposed upon language rather than occurring in quite unforced ways within the language itself.…”