Fiction nowadays can scarcely afford to be unselfconscious, and Irish fiction has often been particularly canny about its own business, the artificiality as well as the serious compulsiveness of telling stories. Paul Muldoon opened his second book Mules three years ago with a poem which both established and then exploded a fiction, a process by which he could ask "where do I stand?" in relation to things "made up as I went along." Behind this merely theoretical question lie issues closer to life, to do with the chosen subject of the poet, whether it is to be a lyric one drawn from tradition ("About pigs and trees, stars and horses") or a more engaged and political one, "something a little nearer home." Either way, Muldoon suggests, an essential and impartial moral truth is beyond the reach of an art which is by its very nature personal and unpredictable...