investigator's meditation on the dead body of a Japanese girl ("something was raising a stink"). "The Side Project", meanwhile, tells of life in a travelling circus for two lovers who end up as "Frog Boy and the Human Chimera". The gruesome and freakish surface is deliberately off-putting, a "protective layer of ice" around the heart of each poem, which turns out to be elegiac after all. The youthful circus fantasy was "forty years ago" (Muldoon is now 59). The dead young woman's body is also, metaphorically, "a poem decomposing" its own emotion.
from The Telegraph: Maggot by Paul Muldoon: review
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