Abstract

The Morning train; November Wedding and Other Poems; The Wind Dog; While these three collections could hardly be said to constitute a representative sample, they do prompt the thought that perhaps we are seeing the emergence of a new convention in the arrangement of poetry collections. Each of these books offers a gathering of short lyric length pieces, together with at least one longer poem or sequence. Paul Muldoon has repeatedly followed this practice of concluding with a long poem, and in his recent collections the long poem has become more and more predominant. None of the authors of these three books goes to that length, but each shows evidence of the need to step beyond the confines of the short lyric.