the Ulster impasse through Keith Douglas in World War II remembering Isaac Rosenberg in World War I: "You saw that beyond the thirstier desert flowers / There fell hundreds of thousands of poppy petals."
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Longley's particular historical emphasis implies that all Northern Irish poetry can be seen as war poetry, still caught up in the aftermath of European and Irish wars from 1914 to 1945. This perspective, which partly derives from his English parentage, also brings literary and cultural relations between the islands into a focus different from either Hewitt's or Heaney's. Wilfred Owen is relevant to the protest elegies in the sequence "Wreaths"; Edward Thomas to Longley's West of Ireland poems, where the ecological strand in English nature poetry meets the Yeatsian visionary tradition.
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Part of MacNeice's legacypart of modernism and modernityis Heraclitean flux. A younger generation of Northern Irish poets, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, and Ciaran Carson (all from Catholic backgrounds) carry flux further into language and form. Concentrated artistic construction has been followed by equally concentratedand equally variousdeconstruction. Paul Muldoon (b. 1951) was the first of these poets to be discussed in deconstructionist or postmodernist terms. However, his poetry lends itself to such readings not so much because it has absorbed international trends, as because it responds both to the absolutism in Northern Irish mentalities, and to the poetry of his seniors.
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Muldoon's first two collections,
New Weather
(1973) and
Mules
(1977), involve a bleaker version of rural terrain and rural community than is to be found in early Heaney. Heaney deals with sexual awakening, but not with themes of infidelity, mutual destructiveness between the generations or sexes, and confusion of gender roles. For instance, whereas the father in Heaney's poetry personifies continuity and stability, in Muldoon's the father becomes a fictive point of reference denoting the history, traditions, ties, and authority that the poetry questions. Thus the title poem of
Mules
is a parable of hybridization between the Northern Irish communities:
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 | | We had loosed them into one field
I watched Sam Parsons and my quick father
Tense for the punch below their belts,
For what was neither one thing or the other.
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The "field" where this problematic birth occurs suggests the contraction
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