The word on the street - Paul Muldoon

In
this new collection Paul Muldoon goes back to the essential meaning of
the term 'lyric' -a short poem sung to the accompaniment of a musical
instrument. These words are written for music, assuredly, with half an
ear to Yeats's ballad-singing porter drinkers and half to Cole
Porter-and indeed, many of them double as rock songs, performed by the
Wayside Shrines, the Princeton-based music collective of which Muldoon
is a member. Their themes are the classic themes of song: lost love,
lost wars, Charlton Heston, barbed wire, pole dancers, cellulite, Hegel,
elephants, Oedipus, more barbed wire, Buddy Holly, Jersey peaches,
Julius Caesar, Trenton, cockatoos, and the Youngers (Bob and John and
Jim and Cole).The Word on the Street is a lively addition to this
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's masterful body of work. It demonstrates,
once again, that, as Richard Eder has written in the pages of the New York Times Book Review,
'Paul Muldoon is a shape-shifting Proteus to readers who try to pin him
down . . . Those who interrogate Muldoon's poems find themselves
changing shapes each time he does.'