The Annals of Chile
by Paul Muldoon
Summary
The Annals of Chile carries two of the great elegies of late twentieth century poetry, and they are elegies only Paul Muldoon could have written, grief run through the most elaborately playful technique in the language. The first is Incantata, his lament for the artist Mary Farl Powers, a former lover dead of cancer at 43: a torrent of memory and protest carried through forty five eight line stanzas of insistent rhyme, in which everything they shared, meals, arguments, art, the names of things, comes flooding back as inventory, the catalog itself becoming the mourning. The second is Yarrow, a long poem for his mother, in which the Armagh farm childhood, the adventure books and westerns the boy read, and the mother's dying interleave in obsessively recycled rhymes, the past returning in loops the way memory actually runs. Around them the collection does what Muldoon always does: puns that turn out to be load bearing, obscure words used with a straight face, forms invented and then honored to the letter. His reputation for difficulty is real and beside the point; the difficulty is the feeling, grief refracted through a mind that cannot stop making connections, and readers who give the long poems the honest reading they ask for tend to come out shaken. The book won the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize, the second ever awarded, confirming the prize's Northern Irish beginnings. Muldoon went on to the Pulitzer, the Oxford Professorship of Poetry, and decades at Princeton, but Incantata remains the poem readers press on each other.
Historical Context & Significance
Muldoon had left Ireland for America in the 1980s, and The Annals of Chile, published in 1994, the year of the ceasefires, is an emigrant's book, its Irish material reached through distance; the title itself points deliberately away from home. The 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize made him the prize's second winner and second Ulster poet, and his influence on the generation that followed, the permissions his wordplay granted, is hard to overstate. America rewarded him in kind: the Howard G. B. Clark chair at Princeton, the Oxford Professorship of Poetry from 1999 to 2004, the poetry editorship at The New Yorker, and a Pulitzer Prize. Incantata has had a public afterlife rare for a contemporary poem, performed as a one man show the elegy the technique existed to make possible.