Pineapples and Pomegranates (Criticism)

Criticism

Anna Maria Hong

Hong earned her master of fine arts in creative writing at the University of Texas Michener Center for Writers and is a writer-in-residence at Richard Hugo House. In the following essay, Hong discusses Muldoon's use of word-shifting, rhyme, and repetition to generate complex associations that delve beneath the surface of apparent meaning.

Like many Muldoon poems, "Pineapples and Pomegranates" is not quite what it first appears to be. The title indicates that the poem's subject is fruit, and the poem begins as a personal anecdote with the speaker recalling his first experience with the pineapple. In the long opening sentence, the speaker muses on the fruit's exotic appeal, its seductiveness to his thirteen-year-old, relatively naive self. However, Muldoon's associations soon lead the reader away from the familiar world of objects to more complex and disturbing issues below the surface of daily life. Muldoon makes this transition from one mode to another seamlessly, by employing his distinctive use of rhyme, word-shifting, and repetition.

A master of poetic technique known for his verbal virtuosity and odd, ingenious rhymes, Muldoon also frequently uses association to juxtapose divergent ideas. In this poem, the speaker begins free-associating in lines 6 – 8, as he recalls that even as a young adolescent, he knew the pineapple "stood for something other than itself alone / while having absolutely no sense / of its being a worldwide symbol of munificence." These lines contrast the innocence of a younger boy with the informed, literary consciousness of the adult, poet-speaker. Although the tone is casual and confiding, the contrast hints at more ominous things to come.

In the next line, the shift to more complex and disturbing concerns begins. As the speaker continues to free-associate from his initial memory of the pineapple, he begins to muse on the words that arise, stating "Munificence — right? Not munitions, if you understand / where I'm coming from." The association seems believable, as the two words "munificence" and "munitions" sound similar. However, these words convey very different meanings, as "munificence" refers to generosity and "munitions" are explosive armaments. This typically Muldoonian word-shifting juxtaposes two divergent ideas, which are held together by sound. By invoking this word-shift, Muldoon ushers in the theme of mutability, of things quickly and almost imperceptibly morphing from one thing into another.

These types of shifts continue throughout the last part of the poem, and in "Pineapples and Pomegranates," this movement tends to go from good intentions to something more sinister. Sometimes the word-shift involves the repetition of a word, as in lines 10 – 12, when Muldoon writes, "As if the open hand / might, for once, put paid / to the hand grenade." The word "hand" is repeated but in entirely different contexts, as the generous, peace-extending "open hand" becomes the explosive munitions "hand grenade" two lines later. In these lines, the speaker expresses a desire for peace, but that wish is undermined by the word-shifting. As with the fluid transition from "munificence" to "munitions," the verbal closeness of the two phrases "open hand" and "hand grenade" indicates how easily one thing can become another and vice versa. Muldoon's slippery use of language emphasizes how porous the borders can be between two opposing modes.

A final instance of word-shifting occurs in the poem's last line, as the speaker concludes, "I'm talking about pineapples — right? — not pomegranates." After all the free-associating in the poem's first thirteen lines, the speaker returns to the idea of the fruit that sparked the chain of associations in the first place. He immediately interrupts himself by comparing the subject to another fruit, one that sounds somewhat similar, as both multisyllabic words begin with the "p" sound. Once again, the two similar-sounding words convey very different ideas, and the shift is from positive to ominous. The expressed symbolism of the pineapple is generosity, whereas the pomegranate recalls a descent into hell.

In Greek legend, Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, eats six pomegranate seeds and thereafter must live in the underworld for six months of every year. In Muldoon's poem, both the pineapple and the pomegranate are, like the apple in the Garden of Eden, symbols of temptation. The pineapple is associated with adolescent sensual longing, as in the first five lines, in which the speaker compares the first pineapple to a breast. This relatively innocent desire contrasts sharply with the temptation associated with the pomegranate, which leads to life in the underworld. Or does it?

The pineapple's function as a "worldwide symbol of munificence" may not be as nice as it first seems to be. "Munificence" is a very liberal giving or bestowing. Gifts can be double-edged, and while the pineapple is symbol of generosity, it is also a symbol of empire and colonialism. Christopher Columbus first encountered the pineapple when he "discovered" the West Indies, bringing European domination to the New World. Like Muldoon, Columbus wrote about the fruit, helping to spread its proliferation throughout the planet on plantations that often exploited laborers. In Muldoon's poem, the juxtaposition of pineapples with the ominous pomegranate incites the reader to reconsider the connotations of the first fruit. Similarly, the slip from "munificence" to "munitions" leads the reader to think about the less benevolent aspects of gift-giving associated with the first word.

Words and their meanings become more complex in the world of Muldoon's poem, because the poet's word-shifts encourage the reader to question first-glance meanings. In this poem as in others by Muldoon, definitive, black-and-white definitions disintegrate in the face of word-play, creating a sense of uncertainty. Muldoon's poem is not the usual personal anecdote ending in a reassuring realization about the self. As Clair Wills notes in her introduction to her book-length study Reading Paul Muldoon, "Rather than a subjective journey of discovery, or a drama of consciousness, the poems offer an arena in which layers of meaning, image, story jostle one another, and slip into one another, mutating and transforming in the process." With all the shifting of words and meanings, the reader may feel that there is no firm ground on which to stand in Muldoon's poem.

Muldoon compounds the sense of uncertainty by using another repetition. He has the speaker use the questioning phrase "right?" twice, once in line 9 and again in the middle of the final line. This phrase serves to undermine the speaker's confidence. In line 9, the phrase immediately precedes the first disturbing word-shift to "munitions." In line 14, the phrase enables the shift from pineapples to pomegranates. Rather than ending the poem on a declarative hope or wish for peace, Muldoon has his speaker question whether or not he even knows what he is talking about. This sense of persistent doubt seems to stem from the musings on munitions, grenades, and pomegranates, which harken back to the violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland during Muldoon's teen years and adulthood. The whimsical word-play leads to serious and distressing memories, which lay beneath the surface of the innocuous-seeming recollection of the pineapple.

In spite of the feelings of doubt and anxiety inspired by the instability of both words and peace in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, to which Muldoon alludes, the poet does not leave the reader hanging in the poem. In the face of this instability, Muldoon meticulously creates structure. This poem is a version of the sonnet, with fourteen lines and an almost entirely regular rhyme scheme of two-line rhymed couplets. In addition to this formal structure, Muldoon's repetitions of words and sounds serve to create a cohesive pattern that holds divergent meanings together. The full end-rhymes throughout the poem, such as "bones / alone" and "understand / hand," generate a sense of satisfying expectation. In addition, the more inventive echoings of sound in instances such as "pomegranates / grenade" add to the sense of structure and cohesion. In a Muldoonian twist, the poem's last word also mimics the meaning of "grenade" when read as the pun "palm-grenade." Although the poem ends with this would-be explosive, the feeling imparted is merely unsettling — not devastating. Using sound and word-play, Muldoon shifts the emphasis back to a sense of security by creating an intricate edifice to house both expansive and destructive impulses in a place where wry musing, and not the weapon, wins the day.

Source: Anna Maria Hong, Critical Essay on "Pineapples and Pomegranates," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Contemporary Authors Online

In the following essay, the author discusses Muldoon's career.

Paul Muldoon is one of Ireland's leading contemporary poets. His short lyrics, modified sonnets and ballads, and dramatic monologues touch on themes of love, maturation, and self-discovery, as well as Irish culture and history. Terse and highly original, Muldoon's poetry is noted for its multiplicity of meaning. In a Stand review, Rodney Pybus asserted that the poet's works reveal a "quirky, off-beat talent for sudden revelatory flights from mundane consequences. . . . He found very early a distinctively wry and deceptively simple-sophisticated lyric voice.

Muldoon is the youngest member of a group of Northern Irish poets — including Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon — which gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. As a student at Queen's University, Muldoon studied under Heaney, and refined his own analytical and critical skills in weekly discussions with other poets. In 1971, at the age of nineteen, Muldoon had completed his first short collection, Knowing My Place. Two years later, he published New Weather, his first widely reviewed volume of poetry. The book secured Muldoon's place among Ireland's finest writers and helped establish his reputation as an innovative new voice in English-language poetry.

The poems in New Weather generally illuminate the complexities of seemingly ordinary things or events. Several critics have noted that the collection's multilayered, heavily imagistic, and metaphoric verse explores psychological development with apparent simplicity and eloquence while offering keen insights into the subjective nature of perception. Calling the collection "the result of continuous age and aging," Roger Conover suggested in a review for Eire-Ireland, "Muldoon's is a poetry which sees into things, and speaks of the world in terms of its own internal designs and patterns." A Times Literary Supplement reviewer, however, felt that the poems in Muldoon's "highly promising collection are flawed by a vagueness of focus that dissipates the strength of original ideas."

Muldoon followed New Weather with the 1977 collection Mules, which opens with a poem reflecting Northern Ireland's civil strife. Recurring themes of political and social relevance inform the other pastorals and ballads in Mules. "The Narrow Road to the North," for instance, depicts the debilitating effects of war on a Japanese soldier who emerges from hiding, unaware that World War II has ended. The poem subtly parallels the soldier's deadened emotional state with the toll that the struggle in Ireland has taken on its citizens. As Peter Scupham noted in his Times Literary Supplement review, "Muldoon's taste for anecdote, invention, and parable shows strongly [in Mules]," and claimed that the collection is "a handsome promise of good poems to come." In Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968 – 1978, Heaney deemed Mules "a strange, rich second collection" and judged the poet "one of the very best."

By the time Muldoon's next volume of poetry, Why Brownlee Left, was published in 1980, the poet had attracted considerable attention for his technical acumen, dry verbal wit, and provocative use of language. Some critics considered Why Brownlee Left a more mature effort than Muldoon's earlier collections. According to Alan Hollinghurst in Encounter, "the key to the book" lies in a seemingly straightforward and elemental poem titled "October 1950." Chronicling the poet's own conception, the poem reflects Muldoon's preoccupation with the search for self and acknowledges, noted Hollinghurst, that life "refute[s] any philosophical attempts to organize or direct it." Feeling that Muldoon's poetry in Why Brownlee Left was composed mainly of "blueprints, sketches, [and] fragments," and that Muldoon is not "a truly satisfying poet," Anglo-Welsh Review's David Annwn nonetheless praised Muldoon for his "unnerving knack of capturing most elusive atmospheres, manipulating the inflexions of Anglo-Irish . . . and conveying a whole spectrum of humour."

Muldoon's 1983 collection, Quoof, takes its title from his family's name for a hot-water bottle. The imaginative poems in the volume offer varying perceptions of the world. "Gathering Mushrooms" opens the book with the narrator's drug-induced reminiscences of his childhood, his father, and the turmoil in Ireland. "The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants," the final poem and the volume's longest, is a narrative that follows the exploits of the mercenary-like figure Gallogly as he voyages through Northern Ireland. Writing in the London Review of Books, John Kerrigan asserted that the poetry in Quoof is "a bewildering display of narrative invention . . . written with that combination of visual clarity and verbal panache which has become the hallmark of Paul Muldoon." Muldoon, in an interview with Michael Donaghy in Chicago Review, commented on the violence in Quoof: "I don't think it's a very likeable or attractive book in its themes."

Meeting the British, Muldoon's 1987 collection, contains several poems of recollection as well as more unusual selections such as "7, Middagh Street," which, according to Terry Eagleton in the Observer, blends fantasy and history with "dramatic energy and calculated irony . . . to produce a major poem." A series of imaginary monologues by such prominent artistic and literary figures as W. H. Auden, Salvador Dali, Gypsy Rose Lee, Carson McCullers, and Louis MacNeice, "7, Middagh Street" contains provocative commentary on the importance of politics in Irish art. Comparing Meeting the British with Quoof, Mark Ford in the London Review of Books found that whereas "Quoof tended to push its metaphors, trance-like, to the point of no return, its mushroom hallucinations not deviation from but a visionary heightening of reality: the poems in Meeting the British seem more self-aware.... Meeting the British adds some wonderful new tricks to Muldoon's repertoire." Deeming Meeting the British Muldoon's "most ambitious collection," Mick Imlah, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, noted that the volume proves an innovative addition "to a difficult and delightful body of poetry." Responding to several critics' attempts to compare the poet's style to that of his contemporaries, Conover proclaimed that Muldoon's "poems are too individual to characterize very effectively in terms of anyone else's work.... [His] conception of the poem is unique."

Muldoon's next collection was the ambitious Madoc: A Mystery, summarized by Geoffrey Stokes in the Village Voice as "quite funny, very difficult, highly ambitious, more than a little unsettling, and . . . subtitled 'A Mystery.' Which it surely is." Named after the title of a Robert Southey poem concerning a Welsh prince who discovers America in the twelfth century, the narrative flow of Madoc revolves around "what might have happened if the Romantic poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had indeed come (as they planned in 1794) to America and created a 'pantisocracy' ('equal rule for all') on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania," commented Lucy McDiarmid in her New York Times Book Review piece on Madoc. Coleridge becomes entranced by peyote and Native American culture while Southey becomes vengeful and tyrannical after a loss of idealism. The question, in the words of Thomas M. Disch in Poetry, is whether or not Madoc's "helter-skelter narrative pattern, with its excursions into such parallel lives as those of Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, Lewis and Clark, Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson, and George Catlin, add up either to a memorable drama or to a coherent vision of history?" Despite finding Madoc "readable for its entire length," Disch's answer remained: "I don't think so." Michael Hoffman in the London Review of Books concluded, however, that each "reading — and still more, every new bit of information — makes Madoc a cleverer and more imposing piece of work." Stokes countered Disch, and commented: "The question is whether it's worth stepping into Madoc even once; the answer is an unqualified yes."

"The Annals of Chile is easier of access and more emotionally direct than Madoc, while more allusive and arcane than [Muldoon's] earlier work," argued Richard Tillinghast in the New York Times Book Review. "Incantata," one of two central poems in The Annals of Chile, remembers Muldoon's lover Mary Farl Powers in a "beautiful and heartfelt elegy" in the words of Times Literary Supplement reviewer Lawrence Norfolk. "It is Muldoon's most transparent poem for some time, and also his most musical." "Yarrow," the second, "jazzily juxtaposes swashbuckling daydreams . . . with real life's painful memories of a druggy girlfriend's breakdown and the death of [Muldoon's] mother," commented Michael Dirda in a Washington Post Book World review. Mark Ford, in a review of Annals in the London Review of Books, found the themes of "less scope for the kinds of all-synthesizing wit characteristic of Muldoon." William Pratt concluded in World Literature Today that for those readers "who enjoy having a leg pulled, Muldoon is your man; to those who expect something more substantial from poetry, Muldoon rhymes with buffoon." Los Angeles Times Book Review's Katherine McNamara, however, found that in Annals, "every word, every reference, every allusion, carries meaning. Muldoon never flinches in his brilliant verbal workings." In his review of The Annals of Chile for Poetry, F. D. Reeve characterized Muldoon as "a juggler, a handspringing carny, a gandy dancer, a stand-up comic, and intellectual muckraker," and went on to state: "He bends language as easily as Geller, the psychic, bent spoons."

The 1996 Kerry Slides, in which Muldoon's poems are accompanied by the photographs of Bill Doyle, received significant praise from Patricia Monaghan of Booklist who dubbed it "an inspired collaboration." The title of the book refers both to the Irish dance of that name and to Doyle's photos of Kerry County in southwestern Ireland. "Muldoon's short poems," Monaghan remarked, "are only obliquely connected to Doyle's black-and-white photos," yet at the same time she felt that their "wild rhymes and witty wordplay encapsulate history, myth, language, and landscape." Monaghan found Doyle's photos to be "dreamlike despite their sharpness," and went on to note "his eye sees beyond the picturesque to the archetypal."

Muldoon's 1998 Hay is a diverse collection, covering subjects from the personal to the political and the universal, offering a range of forms and styles that includes sonnets, sestinas, haiku, and much more. William Logan of New Criterion observed: "Poems shift and ratchet, one time slipping into another, one place substituting for another, scenes turning themselves inside out, lines jolting and stuttering, mysteriously repeating according to some Masonic code, subject to sudden outcries of 'hey' or 'wheehee' or 'tra la.'" The dust jacket for the book describes Muldoon as a "prodigy" who has now become a "virtuoso." It is Muldoon's technical virtuosity that some reviewers of Hay fastened upon as a drawback in the work. Reviewing the book for The New Republic Adam Kirsch noted: "if virtuosity is all that a poet can display, if his poems demand attention simply because of their elaborateness and difficulty, then he has in some sense failed.... It is true that Muldoon sometimes writes directly, with plain emotion, even sentimentality. But those are not his most characteristic poems, nor his best. When he is at his most original, Muldoon is rather a kind of acrobat, piling up strange rhymes, references, and conceits in a way that is disorienting and exhilarating." According to Logan: "Muldoon is . . . in love (not wisely but too well) with language itself.... Too often the result is tedious foolery, the language run amok with Jabberwocky possibility (words, words, monotonously inbreeding), as if possibility were reason enough for the doing." Yet almost as if in spite of themselves, both Logan and Kirsch also offered praise for Hay. Logan concluded: "Everyone interested in contemporary poetry should read this book.... In our time of tired mirrors and more-than-tiresome confession, Muldoon is the rare poet who writes through the looking glass." In a similar vein, Kirsch remarked: "at a time when poetry has all but forgotten the possibilities of adventurous form, when the majority of poets are trivially self-expressive and the minority with higher ambitions pursue a formless complexity, Muldoon's ability to construct his poems is rare, and admirable."

Muldoon once told CA: "I started [writing poetry] when I was fifteen or sixteen. I'd written a few poems before then, as I suppose most people do. It seems to me that children of eight or nine — though I don't remember writing anything myself when I was that age — are in a way some of the best poets I've come across. Poems by children of that age are quite fresh, untrammeled by any ideas of what a poem might be or what a poem should look like. While I think it's perhaps a little romantic to suggest it, I believe it's something of that quality that people a little older are trying to get back to, something of that rinsed quality of the eye.

"I wrote lots of poems as a teenager, many of them heavily under the influence of T. S. Eliot, who seemed to me to be quite a marvelous person. I devoured Eliot and learned everything I could about him. He's a bad person, though, for anyone trying to write to learn from, since his voice is so much his own; I ended up doing parodies of Eliot. I read a lot of poetry, modern poetry as well as poetry by writers all the way through in English and indeed in Irish. And gradually I began to learn, particularly from writers who were round about, like Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and other Irish writers who were writing about things I knew about. I think it's quite important to have people round about who remind one that writing poetry is not an entirely weird occupation, that one isn't the only one trying to do it.

"As to choosing poetry rather than some other form of writing, in a way I chose poetry over the weekly essay. We had a teacher who used to assign an essay every week, and rather than an essay, I wrote a poem one week because it seemed to me a much easier, certainly a shorter, thing to do. In a way it was out of laziness that I felt I might try to write poems, and I continued to do it. I'd love to be able to write prose, and I've written the occasional little autobiographical piece for radio or whatever, but I find it takes me so long to write a sentence, or to write anything. I don't have a natural fluency in writing. The poems I do try to write are aimed to sound very off-the-cuff, very simple and natural, as if they were spoken, or as if they were composed in about the same time as it takes to speak them. But I spend a lot of time getting that effect; it doesn't come naturally.

"There is a school of thought that holds that the writer is dead, and really anyone can read whatever they like into this text, as they insist on calling it nowadays. I think one of the jobs of a writer is to contain and restrict the range of possible meanings and readings and connotations that a series of words on a page can have. There's an element of the manipulative about the process of writing. The writer is very truly a medium if things are ideal. The writer should be open to the language and allowing the language to do the work. I don't want to sound like somebody who's heavily into Zen, but I really do believe in all of that; I believe in inspiration in some way.

"On the other hand, there is this other part involved in the writing, the part that is marshaling and is looking on as an acute, intense reader. When I am writing, I'm in control of this uncontrollable thing. It's a combination of out of control and in control. What I'm interested in doing, usually, is writing poems with very clear, translucent surfaces, but if you look at them again, there are other things happening under the surface. And I am interested in poems that go against their own grain, that are involved in irony, that seem to be saying one thing but in fact couldn't possibly be saying that. I am interested in what's happening in those areas, and I do try to control that and hope that I have controlled it. But sometimes when I reread a poem much later (which I don't usually do), I wonder, What on earth was I thinking of there?"

Source: "Paul Muldoon," in Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2004.

What Do I Read Next?

• Muldoon's collection Poems 1968 – 1998 (2001) contains his eight previous volumes of poetry.
• Muldoon edited The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1986), which features a number of other prominent Irish poets, including Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, Michael Longley, and Seamus Heaney.
• To Ireland, I (2000) includes Muldoon's lectures on Irish literature.
• Selected Poems 1966 – 1987 (1990) comprises poems by Muldoon's early mentor, the Nobel laureate and fellow Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney.
• The anthology Modern Irish Drama (1991) features plays by several Irish writers, including W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, and Samuel Beckett. The collection also includes essays and criticism about Irish drama.
• William Trevor's The Collected Stories (1993) contains stories about life in contemporary rural Ireland from several of the acclaimed writer's collections.
• The Longest War: Northern Ireland's Troubled History (2002), by Marc Mulholland, explores the issues and debates about the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
• Translated from Hebrew into English by Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, Open Closed Open: Poems (2000) is Yehuda Amichai's final collection and magnum opus.
• American poet Heather McHugh's collection Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968 – 1993 (1994) features poems lauded for their verbal ingenuity. Muldoon selected this collection as one of his favorites.
• Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (1997), by Peter McDonald, tackles the question of Northern Irish poetry and politics through close studies of a number of important writers, including Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Louis Mac Neice, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, and others.