Of Plan B, an interim volume that included several of the poems in Maggot, Robert McCrum recently said in the London Observer that 鈥淧aul Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet鈥檚 task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection.鈥� In his eleventh full-length book, Muldoon reminds us that he is a traditional poet who is steadfastly at odds with tradition. If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn鈥檛 your father鈥檚 poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W. B. Yeats鈥檚 remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are 鈥渟ex and the dead,鈥� Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It鈥檚 no accident that the centerpiece 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 memorialize the scenes of fatal automobile accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title sequence but also many of the round songs that characterize Maggot, and has led Angela Leighton, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, to see these new poems as giving readers 鈥渁 thrilling, wild, fairground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish.鈥�