[The essay from which this excerpt is taken was originally broadcast over Radio Telefis Eireann in 1978.]

Paul Muldoon's first book was aptly titled New Weather: it introduced us to a distinctive sensibility, a supple inward music, a poetry that insisted on its proper life as words before it conceded the claims of that other life we all live before and after words. Mules continues and develops this hermetic direction and is a strange, rich second collection, reminding one sometimes of the sophisticated repose of poésie pure, and sometimes bringing one down to earth in the simple piety of the local ballad. It is as if the poems spring from some mixed imaginative marriage, as if their genesis is mule-like, and indeed one excellent entry-point into the book is a poem called 'The Mixed Marriage'…. [In this poem one hears the poet's] delicate tone, half-way between cajolement and...