[Paul Muldoon] represents a painfully accurate rendezvous for the exacting requirements of traditional skill, youthful experiment and popular demand. But the poems [in New Weather], though sometimes competition winners, are rather iced with their own talent…. [He has] a punchy inventiveness, a dry, flourished mascularity, which, with low Irish cunning, cleverly disguises and brings up to date for city consumption their essential literariness. Muldoon's detached virtuosity sits uneasily on the shoulders of a twenty-two-year-old, distracting one's attention. But why should this be? Must poets develop backwards now to hold us? Must they unmature?… Muldoon's effects seem worked up, the target too aimed for. Yet there is joy in a bullseye…. He has an instinctive feel for things which will embody his thoughts, which is fine … when his thoughts are not too intent on poetry. When this happens he sees meanings on every street corner and sometimes they are...