SOURCE: Roberts, Michèle. “Strong Tease.” New Statesman and Society 7, no. 322 (30 September 1994): 54-5.

In the following review, Roberts offers a positive assessment of The Annals of Chile, noting Muldoon's “sharp observation.”

These are poems obsessed with language. The reader stumbles upon them like shining jewels heaped in a cave, an arranged mass of cut and carved parts, a word hoard brought up out of darkness to be exclaimed at and praised, turned and spun in the palm. It's almost impossible to convey a sense of what the poems are like: they are. They are collections of words fastidiously fitted together, with the utmost craftmanship, to dazzle, amuse, sadden, provoke.

It's as though Muldoon is playing with all the language in the world; there's such richness and prodigality here in the way he allows himself to deploy exactly the word that works. The tightly controlled forms tug pleasurably against...