Author: By Andrew Frisardi

Date: SUNDAY, December 27, 1998

Page: L2

Section: Books

The Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon, who teaches at Princeton University, is without question one of the most inventive poets writing in English today. His admirers justly praise his unpredictableness, verbal panache, and downright maniacal gusto. These very virtues, however, can be problematic, as his critics complain, since, while Muldoon is seemingly able to make a poem out of almost nothing, an unusual ability, to say the least, sometimes his poetry seems to be just that: sweet -- or, more often, pungent -- nothings.

Muldoon's wickedly witty verbal invention and high-spirited lampooning of everything, including himself, is in top form in the 30-sonnet sequence that finishes ``Hay,'' a wild tour de force of verbal legerdemain and weird juxtaposition. In Muldoon's poetry, settings can change as rapidly as they do in dreams; here, the ``focus'' alternates between a fancy Paris restaurant; a death-ferry crossing the Sea of Moyle with the speaker's father on board; rural Australia, which apparently constitutes a kind of afterlife; and ancient Troy, where Aeneas is in the process of rescuing his father from the flames.

Much of the sequence reads like ``Jabberwocky,'' although in this case all of the words can be found in the dictionary: ``. . . and I glanced the glance of one of those kookaburras / through the canebrakes, the kookaburra that laughs last, / and I saw her laugh // as I continued to peruse / the dessert menu cum wine list, / every so often turning over a new coolibar leaf.''

There is a great deal of formal and thematic variety in ``Hay'': a few dozen sonnets (a form at which Muldoon is a virtuoso); autobiographical narratives; poems that very ingeniously end all of their lines with the same word, exploiting its different meanings (``So I learned firsthand / to deal in the off-, the under-, the sleight-of-hand, / writing now in that great, open hand / yet never quite showing my hand''); and a poem composed entirely of hybrid proverbs (``You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it hold / its nose to the grindstone''). A 20-page sequence called ``Sleeve Notes,'' each section of which is headed by the title of a popular LP or CD, starting with Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s and progressing to a recent Rolling Stones recording, has as one of its themes the breaking down of the aesthetic reserve of a bookish young man, who lives vicariously through popular music and musicians, until he finally comes out of himself.

A more introspective section of the book is a sequence of 90 haiku, which brilliantly exploits that form's potential for imagistic expression. Muldoon's astonishing verbal gift and vivid visual sense combine to create a memorable impression of some of the ordinary epiphanies of the poet's everyday life with his wife and daughter:

The maple's great cask

that once held so much in store

now yields a hip flask.

Much of one's reaction to Muldoon's more verbally flashy poems depends on the importance one attaches to what Seamus Heaney has called the ``delight in the trickery and lechery that words are capable of.'' For me, such stuff, when unaccompanied by meaningful or moving content, is more entertaining than sustaining. But there is enough going on in ``Hay'' to engage readers from many different persuasions.

``The Triumph of Love'' follows Geoffrey Hill's last collection of verse, ``Canaan,'' by just one year, an unprecedented rate of publishing for a writer whose extremely compressed and allusive poems are rarely the sort of work that appears in quantity. The 150-poem sequence can be seen as an antiphony to ``Canaan'' and to Hill's entire oeuvre -- a satirical and self-reflexive commentary on it. The familiar central theme of Hill's work is here -- spiritual, moral, and political bankruptcy, and the failure of all but a few people to do anything about it or even to acknowledge it -- but Hill treats it with more hum or, more self-recrimination, and more outrageousness than in his previous books.

Hill (who teaches at Boston University) learned from Ibsen, whose ``Brand'' he has translated, to transmogrify his verse from tragedy into farce; this book is the embodiment of that lesson. The third section invokes both an arch-satirist and a great Christian poet and mystic to communicate the book's double perspective, laus et vituperatio, praise and invective:

Petronius Arbiter, take us in charge;

carry us with you to the house of correction.

Angelus Silesius, guard us while we are there.

It is clear, however, that the spirit of Petronius dominates this book; Hill has always been satirical and bitter, but never has his satire been so blunt and farcical: ``Up yours,'' he addresses one of the villains responsible, Hill believes, for the mindless destruction of humanistic culture.

The sequence as a whole is arranged in small, interwoven groupings that usually, though not always, maintain a mood, a voice, and a subject matter for three or four numbered sections, then shift into a radically different mode. The book is a medley of voices, including ironic ``editorial comments'' in brackets inserted into the text; autobiographical scenes from childhood and youth in war-torn, spiritually bankrupt England; frequent use of puns, often presented as mock ``errata'' (``For definitely the right era, read: deaf in the right ear''); potshots at just about everything Hill considers hypocritical or unjustly admired (``worthless N. and N. now Swedish millionaires,'' i.e., winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature); elegies for forgotten cultural and political heroes of integrity; devout contemplations; and more.

But moods and modes are never long-lasting in this book; righteous invective can be followed by tongue-in-cheek self-recriminations in the voice of the poet's opponents: ``Rancorous, narcissistic old sod -- what / makes him go on? We thought, hoped rather, / he might be dead.'' And some sections of the sequence contain rapid shifts between several of these modes, in the span of just 10 lines or so.

When I read Hill, I am surrounded by reference books, since his poems are a veritable archeological dig of names, places, and verbal artifacts. So soon after reading ``Canaan'' in depth, I must admit that it felt like a chore to slog through Hill's obscure allusions in ``The Triumph of Love.'' But still harder to take in large doses is his puritanical severity -- more reminiscent of Jeffers or Eliot, really, than Blake or Lawrence, whom Harold Bloom always claims to be Hill's forebears. Even Hill's humor does little to soften his austere theology.