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Overview
Subtitled A Mystery, this verse narrative collects several poems concerning the so-called "Pantisocracy" (meaning a state ruled equally by all), a utopian scheme devised and later abandoned by the 18th-century poet-philosophers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. What if they had indeed set up such an ideal community on the banks of the Susquehanna? That is the crux of this book's long and fascinating title poem, which depicts events via the mind's eye of one of Southey's reputed descendants.
The poems in this book also focus more directly on the legend of Madoc himself, the Welsh prince who some believe came to America 300 years before Columbus and sired a line of Welsh-speaking Indians.
Subtitled A Mystery, this is a poem about the utopian "Pantisocratic" plan, a scheme once devised and abandoned by eighteenth-century poet-philosophers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. What if they had indeed set up this ideal community on the banks of the Susquehanna? This is the crux of the poem's theme offering a version of events drawn from the mind's eye of one of Southey's reputed descendants.
Synopsis
Subtitled A Mystery, this verse narrative collects several poems concerning the so-called "Pantisocracy" (meaning a state ruled equally by all), a utopian scheme devised and later abandoned by the 18th-century poet-philosophers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. What if they had indeed set up such an ideal community on the banks of the Susquehanna? That is the crux of this book's long and fascinating title poem, which depicts events via the mind's eye of one of Southey's reputed descendants.
The poems in this book also focus more directly on the legend of Madoc himself, the Welsh prince who some believe came to America 300 years before Columbus and sired a line of Welsh-speaking Indians.
Publishers Weekly
In ruggedly lyric segments joined in quasi-narrative style, Irish poet Muldoon--now teaching at Princeton--vigorously reinvests America's frontier wilderness with British and Celtic shenanigans. The Tudor myth informing this invigorating invention is that of Madoc, a Welsh, hotheaded adventurer prince said to have discovered America in the 12th century and begotten the ``Welch Indians.'' The Northwest Madoc tribes, appearing in the poem, were once considered proof. And Thomas Jefferson quaffs Medoc, puns Muldoon, who titles each piece of the preponderant Part II with the name of a famed thinker (e.g., Thales, Diderot, Marx) from antiquity to the present. Under such dignified rubrics the main characters, poets Coleridge and Southey (himself author of a Madoc , a romantic verse epic), cavort with feathered Indians. (The actual emigration scheme of both poets to create a commune or ``Pantisocracy'' in America failed to materialize.) Included are passages from explorers Lewis and Clark, to avoid ambiguity painter and ethnographer George Catlin and poet Byron. The brief introductory ``Part I,'' in a contemporary mode, includes images of containers bobbing in the water--a bathyscope, tea chests, a briefcase. The valise and ``portmanteau'' images resurface often to suggest current poetic forms as envelopes of the past. (Apr.)
Editorials
From the Publisher
"One of the best in a generation of Northern Irish poets born since World War II, Mr. Muldoon has come to be known for . . . a witty, subversive instinct that undermines clichés, truisms, eternal verities, and his own previous sentences . . . Madoc is an outré movie spectacular . . . a tour de force."—Lucy McDiarmid, The New York Times Book Review"More than language—and no one who loves words can fail to be amazed by Muldoon—there is Madoc's story . . . Muldoon's magic consists of lifting Southey's shrewdly calculating apostasy off the pages he wrote and transporting it, full-blown, to a vulgar, brawling, optimistic America—an America that of course remains in the warp and woof of the immediate one."—Geoffrey Stokes, The Village Voice
"Muldoon's reinvention of himself as an American writer is a source of vast entertainment. Madoc is also, though, a profoundly Irish book . . . Muldoon shows us a mind at work, teasing, improvising, listening, reading, loving, and his apparently impersonal narrative turns out to be a winning self-portrait. It is a dazzling achievement."—Lachlan MacKinnon, Times Literary Supplement
"What takes the reader through the poem is pleasure and puzzlement in roughly equal measure . . . Essentially, [Muldoon] is taking his style for a walk, and the style is mesmerising . . . Every reading—and still, more, every new bit of information—makes Madoc a cleverer and more imposing piece of work . . . [Muldoon is] one of the most metaphoric poets alive, in whom words and facts and things themselves are . . . comprehensively and gracefully destabilized."—Michael Hofman, London Review of Books