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.
