PAUL MULDOON

Con una obra tan prolífica como transgresora, Paul Muldoon (Portadown, Irlanda del Norte, 1951) contó ya desde sus inicios con el apoyo entusiasta de los poetas mayores en lengua inglesa, y ha sido confirmado como uno de ellos con premios como el Faber Award, el T. S. Eliot Award o el Irish Times Literature Prize. En el año 2005 se le ha sido concedido el Premio Pulitzer de poesia.

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICETo describe Paul Muldoons influence on contemporary poetry is like trying to assess the influence of The Beatles on post-war music: its to be seen and heard in the work of almost every British and Irish poet since the 1970s.Irish PostSince his debut, New Weather (1973), Paul Muldoon has created some of the most original and memorable poetry of the past half-century. Joy in Service on Rue Tagore sees him writing with the same verve and distinction that have consistently won him the the highest accolades.Here, from artichokes to zinc, he navigates an alphabet of image and history, through barleymen and Irish slavers to the last running wolf in Ulster. The search involves the accumulated bric-a-brac of a life, and a reckoning along the way of gains against loss. In the poets skilful hands, ancient maps are unfurled and brought into focus - the aggregation of Imperial Rome and the dismantling of Standard Oil, the pogroms of a Ukrainian ravine and of a Belfast shipyard. Through modern medicine and warfare, disaster and repair, these poems are electric in their energy, while profoundly humane in their line of enquiry.Truly, is there any living poet with as skilled and rambunctious an ear as Paul Muldoon? . . . One of the pleasures of Muldoons poems is the way they make reality seem to go right to the verge of surrealism, the very shaky lip of it. Jesse Nathan, McSweeneys

Thirty years of work from "the most significant English-language poet born since the second world war.The Times Literary Supplement

Between New Weather (1973), which Seamus Heaney said marked its author as the most promising poet to appear in Ireland for years, and The Annals of Chile, which was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize for the best book of poems of 1994, Paul Muldoon amassed an incomparable body of work. New Selected Poems 1968-1994 offers the authors own choice from his first seven Faber collections, his pamphlets and his opera libretto Shining Brow, and serves as the ideal introduction for readers not yet familiar with his superabundant gifts.The most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War.Times Literary Supplement

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature.She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all thats best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellowed to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies.-- She Walks in Beauty

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 didnt know you needed.

In this new collection Paul Muldoon goes back to the essential meaning of the term lyric -a short poem sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument. These words are written for music, assuredly, with half an ear to Yeatss ballad-singing porter drinkers and half to Cole Porter-and indeed, many of them double as rock songs, performed by the Wayside Shrines, the Princeton-based music collective of which Muldoon is a member. Their themes are the classic themes of song: lost love, lost wars, Charlton Heston, barbed wire, pole dancers, cellulite, Hegel, elephants, Oedipus, more barbed wire, Buddy Holly, Jersey peaches, Julius Caesar, Trenton, cockatoos, and the Youngers (Bob and John and Jim and Cole).The Word on the Street is a lively addition to this Pulitzer Prize-winning poets masterful body of work. It demonstrates, once again, that, as Richard Eder has written in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, Paul Muldoon is a shape-shifting Proteus to readers who try to pin him down . . . Those who interrogate Muldoons poems find themselves changing shapes each time he does.

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 poems line-endings are forms of closure (and where this might leave the poem in prose); whether the poem is completed only with the readers 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?

Mules, Paul Muldoons second collection, was published in 1977.Muldoon seems to me unusually gifted, endowed with an individual sense of rhythm, a natural and copious vocabulary, a technical accomplishment and an intellectual boldness that mark him as the most promising poet to appear in Ireland for years. Seamus Heaney

Selected Poems 1968-2014 offers forty-five years of work drawn from twelve individual collections by a poet who began as a prodigy and has gone on to become a virtuoso (Michael Hofmann). Hailed by Seamus Heaney as one of the eras true originals, Muldoon seems determined to escape definition yet this volume, chosen by the poet himself, serves as an indispensable introduction to his trademark combination of intellectual high jinx and emotional honesty. Among his many honours are the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Shakespeare Prize for contributions from English-speaking Europe to the European inheritance.

Meeting the British is Paul Muldoons fifth collection of poems. They range from an account of the first recorded case of germ wafare, though a meditation on a bar of soap, to a sequence of monologues spoken by some of the famous, or infamous, inhabitants of 7, Middagh Street,, New York, on Thanksgiving Day, 1940.

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 isnt your fathers poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W. B. Yeatss 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. Its 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.

Paul Muldoons collection Hay refines, and re-defines, a lyrical strain in which an ostensible lightness of touch still has the strength to bear the weightiest subject matter. At once conventional and cutting edge, beautiful and bleak, Hay is a book that demonstrates fully the range of Muldoons poetic intelligence and imagination.

Paul Muldoons new collection opens with a sonnet sequence, Horse Latitudes, written as the U.S. embarked on its foray into Iraq. Poems on historical battles where horses played an important part present us with a commentary on the political agenda of America today.

The Annals of Chile is Paul Muldoons seventh collection of poems and contains, amongst other things, celebrations of the birth of his daughter, a plangent and frankly personal lament fo the artist Mary Farl Powers, and a long fantasy invoking the world of boys adventure stories, over which the poets mother presides as a benign influence.

Originally commissioned by Madison Opera as a libretto for American composer Daron Aric Hagen, Shining Brow can be read as a dramatic poem in its own right. Displaying all the structural ingenuity and subtle resonance that have marked Paul Muldoon as the most influential poet of his generation, it tells, with suitable bravura, the story of architectural genius Frank Lloyd Wright and his catastrophic affair with the wife of a wealthy client.

Paul Muldoons 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 Lairds 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.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY 2003Paul Muldoons 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 of bread, an outhouse, a killdeer, Oscar Wilde, or a flock of redknots. At the heart of the book is an elegy for a miscarried child, and that elegiac tone predominates, particularly in the elegant remaking of Yeatss A Prayer for My Daughter with which the book concludes, where a welter of traffic signs and slogans, along with the spirits of admen, hardware storekeepers, flim-flammers, fixers and other forebears, are borne along by a hurricane-swollen canal, and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matter of our age.