PAUL MULDOON

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.

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.

Following his highly-praised Shining Brow (1993), which was also written as an opera libretto for the American composer Daron Aric Hagen, Paul Muldoons Bandanna takes us into very different territory. Its action is set in a small town on the Mexican border; it includes illegal immigrants and corrupt law officers among its dramatis personae; but at its heart is an old-fashioned tale of sexual jealousy and murderous revenge. The drama is powered by a strong emotional thrust, most of it conveyed in the form of popular song, and leading to a devastating climax. Bandanna demonstrates yet again the ever-increasing range of this most versatile of poets.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE POETRY PIGOTT PRIZE IN ASSOCIATION WITH LISTOWEL WRITERS WEEKA howdie-skelp is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. Its a wake-up call. A call to action. The poems in Paul Muldoons 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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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?

These poems delight in a wily, mischievous, nonchalant negotiation between the affections and attachments of Muldoons own childhood, family and place, and the ironic discriminations of a cool literary sensibility and historical awareness.Times Literary Supplement

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

New Weather was Paul Muldoons first book of poems. When it appeared in 1973, Seamus Heaney described its author as 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. While the promise has been amply fulfilled, New Weather gives the poets many, more recent admirers the opportunity to see what a versatile and substantial artist he was from the outset.

The four pieces that make up this work are taken from Muldoons Oxford Clarendon Lectures of 1998. Together, they take the form of an A-Z, or abecedary of Irish literature, in which his imagination forges links between disparate aspects and individuals in the Irish literary landscape, ranging back and forth between modern and medieval. From Beckett and Bowen, through MacNeice, Swift and Yeats - and guided throughout by Joyce - To Ireland, I moves lightly through the long grass of Irish writing. The result is a provocative handbook for the literary traveller, who is treated to an astonishing display of scholarship and idiosyncratic inwardness from Irish literature over the course of a millennium.