SOURCE: Bedient, Calvin. “The Crabbed Genius of Belfast.” Parnassus 16, no. 1 (1990): 195-216.

In the following excerpt, Bedient lauds Muldoon's rejection of the traditional motifs of Irish poetry in Meeting the British and Selected Poems: 1968-1986.

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In the recent work of two Belfast poets, Paul Muldoon and Medbh¹ McGuckian, a calculated art of disturbance makes a stunning appearance. Born in Belfast at the beginning of the 1950s, both poets are brazenly set on shattering the “human” or conventional aspects of reality. Each is in constant training for shock. The equivalents of petrol bombs are going off in their imaginations, moving the shapes of things around crazily. Yet McGuckian leaves Belfast itself out of her nightmare: Desire, not Belfast, is the site of the battle of which she gives an astonishingly colorful, inwardly spinning, dazed, and elegiac report. As for Muldoon, he laughs at Belfast with a sensibility of brass, and...