Dublin Opinion

Last night, while watching battle after successive battle in Lord of the Rings: Two Towers, my mind began to wander a bit. With so much simulated gore on screen it’s inevitable that the mind, for it’s own safety thinks of things that are peripheral to the main action. In my case I started thinking about the fate of horses in battle.

While this was an idle thought with me it’s something that poet extraordinaire Paul Muldoon has put a great deal of work into.

Muldoon says, in the introduction to Horse Latitudes, his latest collection, that the book was started just “as the US embarked on its foray into Iraq. The poems have to do with a series of battles (all beginning with the letter ‘B’ as if to suggest a ‘missing’ Baghdad) in which horses or mules played a major role.”

Muldoon is not shy about wrapping his work in an elaborate conceit. Madoc, A Mystery is made up of poems about an imagined journey to the Americas in 1794 that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey may have planned but never made. It’s poetry after all and therefore bound to a certain opacity and ‘great’ works can, in their scale and ambition be difficult. But Muldoon has often been charged with being “tricky, clever, tickled by its own knowingness” and willfully obscure for its own sake.

The highly literate Irish blogger Georgiasam, for example, has this excellent take on Muldoon’s verbal trickery:
“Whenever something threatens to push a [Muldoon] poem into outright obscurity rather than slightly-baffling-but-obviously-very-cute-once-you’ve-worked-it-out obscurity, he can always slam on the handbrake of the Muldoon existential stammer ™. It’ll all work out in the end, the poem says. Just you wait. And in the interval (‘W-w-wait… something will come’, as Henry James used to say, wagging his finger, during his epic pauses), aren’t these poems good enough to read twice? Except, my point is, once already feels like twice.”

But Muldoon is willing to put his hands up in this regard:

“If the poem has no obvious destination, there’s a chance that we’ll all be setting off on an interesting ride.”[and then elsewhere] “I sometimes make little jokes and I do, quite often, engage in leading people on, gently, into little situations by assuring them that all’s well and then - this sounds awfully manipulative, but part of writing is about manipulation - leaving them high and dry, in some corner at a terrible party, where I’ve nipped out through the bathroom window.”

I haven’t read Horse Latitudes, so I can’t comment on what it may reveal about the fates of horses in war time. But I did read this interesting fact from the Guardian review of the book, which refers to an earlier Muldoon collection and shows that horses and war have been on Muldoon’s mind for a while.

“The early title-poem of the volume Mules (1977) was inspired by a newsreel from the Korean war, showing ammunition-laden mules being parachuted into a battlefield. Here, in “Burma”, the mules are remembered as having had their vocal cords cut to prevent them from braying and giving away the soldiers’ position.”

The title itself ‘Horse Latitudes’ refers, according to the fly leaf on the book, to:

“an area north and south of the equator in which ships tend to be becalmed, in which stasis if not stagnation is the order of the day, and where sailors traditionally threw horses overboard to conserve food and water”

Fate is not kind to the rough shod war horse.