Why Brownlee left is paul Muldoon's third book of poems, and his most interesting so far. Whereas, in the earlier books, he didn't do a great deal more than exercise the quirky, oblique lyricism which has become his personal signature, he puts it here to the service of an idea, or complex of ideas, which constitutes a private poetry of departure. An 'inner émigré', in Seamus Heaney's phrase, he proposes for himself, for his father, for a childhood neighbour, real or imagined disappearing acts. This is, from one point of view, another example of the time-honoured Irish instinct to get out (generally accompanied by an obsession with the abandoned isle); and, indeed, there is the merest hint of political exasperation in one or two poems. Or perhaps 'exasperation' is too positive, too recognisable an emotion to ascribe to Muldoon, whose characteristic posture is one of child-like wonder in the face of multiple possibility. There is no 'plague on both your houses' here, but a reticence born of an inability to take sides, as in 'The Boundary Commission', which I quote in full:

LRB 20 November 1980 | PDF Download