The Poetry Of Paul Muldoon

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet delivers a sharp wake-up call with his fourteenth collection. 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 Howdie-Skelp, Paul Muldoon’s new collection, include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a heroic 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. Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture but to command our attention.

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.'

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, in which 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, un 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 Yeats's "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, flimflammers, 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. Moy Sand and Gravel is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

"The Poetry of Paul Muldoon introduces the student and general reader to the critical discussion surrounding Muldoon's oeuvre, as well as to his major themes. It examines the poet's meditations on culture and nature, human and animal, speculations on the act of perception, figures fragmented by the Troubles, and philosophical considerations of colonisation. It then discusses what rank among the most beautiful and intricate elegies of our time. For Muldoon, art's complicity in suffering is a political, self-indicting question, which his best poems endeavour to answer. If sometimes this Pulitzer Prize winner insists that art has a positive role to play, at other times he fears that it merely feeds off the carnage. This critical book shows how, for Muldoon, art should not merely repeat the devastation of the world - although he is afraid that it does, and engages in bitter moral despair that places his work among the very best any contemporary poet has written. The Poetry of Paul Muldoon unearths difficult questions of form with a metaphysical significance that is suitable to our times."--BOOK JACKET.

"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'?

The Poetry of Paul Muldoon introduces the student and general reader to the critical discussion surrounding Muldoon’s oeuvre, as well as to his major themes. It examines the poet’s meditations on culture and nature, human and animal, speculations on the act of perception, figures fragmented by the Troubles, and philosophical considerations of colonisation. It then discusses what rank among the most beautiful and intricate elegies of our time. For Muldoon, art’s complicity in suffering is a political, self-indicting question, which his best poems endeavour to answer. If sometimes this Pulitzer Prize winner insists that art has a positive role to play, at other times he fears that it merely feeds off the carnage. This critical book shows how, for Muldoon, art should not merely repeat the devastation of the world - although he is afraid that it does, and engages in bitter moral despair that places his work among the very best any contemporary poet has written. The Poetry of Paul Muldoon unearths difficult questions of form with a metaphysical significance that is suitable to our times.

A new collection from the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Though Frolic and Detour is Paul Muldoon’s thirteenth collection, it shows all the energy and ambition we might generally associate with a first book. Here, the poet brings his characteristic humor and humanity to the chickadee, the house wren, the deaths of Leonard Cohen and C. K. Williams, the Irish Rising, the Great War, and how “a streak of ragwort / may yet shine / as an off-the-record / remark becomes the party line.” Frolic and Detour reminds us that the sidelong glance is the sweetest, the tangential approach the most telling, and shows us why Paul Muldoon was described by Nick Laird, writing in The New York Review of Books, as “the most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets, [who] writes poems like no one else.”