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WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY 2003 Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, where he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening, as gritty as they are graceful, these poems seem capable of taking in almost anything, and anybody, be it a Tuareg glimpsed on the Irish border, Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth I, a hunted hare, William Tell, William Butler Yeats, Sitting Bull, Ted Hughes, an otter, a fox, Mr and Mrs Stanley Joscelyne, an unearthed pit pony, a loaf ...
SHORTLISTED FOR THE POETRY PIGOTT PRIZE IN ASSOCIATION WITH LISTOWEL WRITERS' WEEK A 'howdie-skelp' is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It's a wake-up call. A call to action. The poems in Paul Muldoon's striking new collection include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an 'affront' to good taste. Paul Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture, but to hold our attention.
In his eleventh full-length collection, Paul 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'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 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 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 characterize Maggot and has led Angela Leighton, writing in the TLS, to see these new poems (on their earlier appearance in Plan B, an interim volume which included several of the poems in Maggot) as giving readers 'a thrilling, wild, fairground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish.'
Frolic and Detour is a book that is at once engaged and engaging, woven with subtle threads of history and geography that represent not only our profound interconnectedness but the fragility of those very connections. Ranging as it does from poems that take as their subject matter the Native American leaders Joseph Brant and Mangas Coloradas, through the Great War, the Irish Rising, hunting with eagles, the house wren, to the day-to-day assault of twenty-first-century America, Frolic and Detour reminds us that the sidelong glance is the sweetest, the tangential approach the most telling. It also reminds us why, in his review for the New York Times of Selected Poems 1968-2014, Dwight Garner described it as 'a compact, powerful book, filled with catharses you didn't know you needed'.
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The Faber Book of Beasts is a collection of many of the best poems in English about the creatures who share our planet. The animal kingdom has prompted some of the liveliest and most enjoyable writing by poets, from Homer to our contemporaries. Among the creatures gathered here, tame or wild; common or exotic, are mammals, reptiles, birds, insects, and others perhaps more fanciful than real. A zoologist's delight.There is, too, a moral or philosophical purpose. As Paul Muldoon says in his introduction: 'We are most human in the presence of animals.' And it is just this sense of how our humanity is illuminated by the contemplation of bestial life that he has set out to celebrate. The results are wonderfully rich and thought-provoking.
"The Anthologist" captures all the warmth, wit, and extraordinary prose stylethat have made Baker--a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author--anAmerican master.
The End of the Poem contains the fifteen lectures delivered by Paul Muldoon as Oxford Professor of Poetry, from 1999 to 2004. Rather than individual and discrete performances, these lectures form a dazzling set of variations around the sustained theme of 'the end of the poem'. Each lecture explores a different sense of an ending: whether a poem can ever be a free-standing structure, read and written in isolation from other poems; whether a poem's line-endings are forms of closure (and where this might leave the poem in prose); whether the poem is completed only with the reader's act of understanding; whether revision brings a poem nearer to its ideal ending (when does a poet know when a poem has come to an end?); what is the right true end of poetry, and is the end of the poem the beginning of criticism, including an Arnoldian 'criticism of life'?
Paul Muldoon's new book, his twelfth collection of poems, is wide-ranging in its subject matter yet is everywhere concerned with watchfulness. Heedful, hard won, head-turning, heartfelt, these poems attempt to bring scrutiny to bear on everything, including scrutiny itself. One Thousand Things Worth Knowing confirms Nick Laird's assessment, in the New York Review of Books, that Paul Muldoon is 'the most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets, [who] writes poems like no one else.'