Paul Muldoon is a 51-year old Belfast native, teacher at Princeton and also the Professor of Poetry at Oxford (a position once held by his mentor, Seamus Heaney). He also carries the unofficial title of "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War" (Times Literary Supplement) through his unique combination of honesty, complexity, and an amazing ear for the spoken word. In his ninth collection of poems, Moy Sand and Gravel (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 105 pp., $22), Muldoon shows that he is still quite capable of giving his readership what a critic once called "linguistic euphoria"

What is most surprising about Moy Sand and Gravel is that it is not a surprising work, considering that it comes from the ever-changing Muldoon. His preceding collection, 1998's Hay, was proof of a poet willing, eager, and careful to make each new book a step in a daringly new direction. This is not to say that Moy Sand isn't conscious of its place within Muldoon's collected body of work, yet it still seems more an extension of Hay than a distinctly new step.

A handful of poems in Moy Sand show Muldoon working with some of the technical experiments of Hay with varying degrees of success. "News Headlines from the Homer Noble Farm," composed of 19 haikus that follow a terza rima rhyme pattern – best known as the pattern Dante used in the Commedia – feels like an uninspired follow up to the exceptional 90-part "Hopewell Haiku" from Hay.

In "One Last Draw of the Pipe," Muldoon ends all but four lines with the word "draw," approaching the word from many different angles––a classic Muldoon feature. Unfortunately, "One Last Draw" is not as preoccupied with this formal feature as Hay's "They that Wash on Thursday," where every line ends in the word "hand."

A master of the sonnet form, Muldoon begins Moy Sand with "Hard Drive," a sonnet written in Shakespeare's rhyme scheme. It begins:

With my back to the wall

and a foot in the door

and my shoulder to the wheel

I would drive through Seskinore.

This is classic Muldoon: the love for cliché idioms, especially when they are used literally (my favorite example: "If Michael (Jackson)'s moon-suit of aluminum foil / were to suddenly split at the seams / he'd not only buy, but fertilize, the farm"), the slant rhyme of "wall/wheel," (others in this collection include "expert/unzipped," "Auschwitz/beach," "caravan/microphone"), and the use of a word like "Seskinore," whose sound gives the reader more satisfaction than its actual meaning or location.

"Hard Drive" ends with the couplet, "and Dunnamanagh and Ballynascreen, / keeping that wound green." "That wound," the reader later discovers, is Muldoon's miscarried child, Asher. Although Asher is only mentioned in three of the pieces, Muldoon's ability to weave together individual poems into one coherent body of work – self-reference is another staple of his style – makes us to constantly aware of the central theme, even when it's not directly expressed.

In "Redknots," what we know from the other poems casts a painful light on the description of redknot birds eating horseshoe crab eggs:

Eating the eggs of the horseshoe crabs

is what gives them the strength to go on,

forty or fifty thousand of them getting up all at once

as if for a rock concert encore.

As in his previous work, Muldoon remains at a safe distance from the emotions that provide the impetus for the poem, avoiding sentimentality while still seeming heartfelt. An odd shift in direction at the end of a poem, such as in the mention of the rock concert in "Redknots," does not steer the poem completely away from the central issue.

Among the best selections of Moy Sand are "Unapproved Road" (composed of 20 terza rima stanzas) and the surreal, dreamlike "At the Sing of the Black Horse, September 1999," the concluding long poem which Muldoon models after the stanzas of W.B. Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter." It's significant that Yeats' influence on Muldoon is more visible in Moy Sand than in his preceding works. And if we do not hear a particularly new voice out of Muldoon in Moy Sand, there's still more than 30 years of wholly unique poetry for this voice to interact with. It's a voice worth listening to.