Dimensions
145 x 222 x 15mm
If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn't your father's poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W.B. Yeats's remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are 'sex and the dead', Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It's no accident that the centrepiece of Maggot is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its subject the urge to memorialise the scenes of fatal car accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title sequence but many of the round-songs that characterise Maggot.