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By Robert Hass
February 21, 1999
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Irish haiku? Irish haiku in New Jersey? Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet of the next generation after Seamus Heaney. Every generation has to clear a space to make itself heard, and Muldoon's way to clear a space in a tradition that includes William Butler Yeats, a visionary and urbane poet, and Patrick Kavanaugh, an earthy country poet, and Seamus Heaney, whom some have said is a perfect fusion of the two impulses, was to write a different poetry altogether, witty, cosmopolitan, playful and postmodern. Lately Muldoon has been teaching at Princeton, and his latest book, "Hay," contains a sequence of haiku, mostly set in New Jersey. Muldoon's way with the form is to observe the syllable count – five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables – and to rhyme the first and last line. Here's a taste:
Hopewell Haiku
I
The door of the shed
open-shuts with the clangor
of red against red.
II
A muddle of mice.
Their shit looks like caraway
but smells like allspice.
V
A stone at its core,
this snowball's the porcelain
knob on winter's door.
VIII
Snow up to my shanks.
I glance back. The path I've hacked
is a white turf bank.
IX
Pennons in pine woods
where the white-tailed stag and doe
until just now stood.
XII
For most of a week
we've lived on a pot of broth
made from pig's cheek.
XIX
A mare's long white face.
A blazed tree marking a trail
we'll never retrace.
XXI
Jean stoops to the tap
set into a maple's groin
for the rising sap.
XXII
The Canada geese
straighten a pantyhose seam,
press a trouser crease.
– And so through the year. He ends with the maple tree again:
XC
The maple's great cask
that once held so much store
now yields a hip flask.
From "Hay," by Paul Muldoon. Copyright 1998 by Paul Muldoon. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Robert Hass, former U.S. poet laureate, is the author, most recently, of the collection "Sun Under Wood."
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