Paul Muldoon – Binge (The Lifeboat)
Judges’ Comments
The judges were delighted by the great energy and inventiveness of these poems, their formal and linguistic brio and the emu-like way they seem to digest almost any subject matter. Some poems address landscape and life in Northern Ireland, others address friends and alert us to wonders and strangeness around the globe. The poetry can be very much of the moment – the title poem is a fantasia on a week’s news stories from The Times –, but it also ranges back across millennia of culture and history. Along the way, deadly serious observations rub against genuinely funny jokes. Paul Muldoon may be a long established presence, but this pamphlet is wonderfully fresh.
A Ruin
It might have been a gristmill, a dilapidated granary or grange
I first drove by some sixty years ago
and, with my little eye, espied
through a door-frame the tousled ferns
and red-haired dockens
of kids my own age sent out to play in the snow,
their snowballs
so specific in the sprawl.
Windowless now, roofless, tucked
under the first, sheltering hill of a range
that ran all the way to Mexico —
a country into which we still hoped to ride
hell-for-leather, still hoped to adjourn
after the stick-up — this ruin betokens
not only the slo-mo-
mowing of a meadow for a shopping mall
but the fate that would befall
the many tagged and retagged
over those sixty years. The landscape is so marked by change,
the bungled peace process, the shoddy bungalows,
the wind farms taking us in their stride,
so marked by all the turns
things have taken
for kids now summoned back from playing in the snow,
the nettles almost as tall
as its dividing wall,
a ruin seems the only thing intact.