Moy Sand and Gravel: Poems

In his ninth volume of poems, Paul Muldoon works a rich vein extending from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, where he grew up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he lives now. As gritty as they are graceful, these poems encompass almost anything and anybody. An elegiac tone predominates, particularly in the remaking of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter," in which a welter of traffic signs and slogans, along with the spirits of admen, hardware-store keepers, flimflammers, fixers, and other forebears, are borne along by a hurricane-swollen canal, and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matters of our age.