Volume 53, Number 20 · December 21, 2006
The Call of the Stallion
By Mark Ford
Horse Latitudes
by Paul Muldoon
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 107 pp., $22.00
The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures
by Paul Muldoon
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 406 pp., $30.00
'Horse latitudes' is a nautical term referring to areas thirty degrees north and south of the equator. Ships sailing these waters often find themselves becalmed, or thrown off course by baffling, unpredictable winds. Paul Muldoon's new volume of poems, Horse Latitudes, begins with a sequence of nineteen sonnets obliquely concerned with nineteen battles all beginning with the letter B: some are famous, such as the battles of Bannockburn, the Boyne, Bosworth Field, and Blenheim; others, like Baginbun, Benburb, Blaye, and Bazentin, less so. The sonnets often highlight the role played by horses or mules in these battles, and include a series of jibes at a present-day commander in chief bogged down or becalmed in another battleground beginning with B: Bush in Baghdad.
Review, 4026 words
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