Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, The Annals of Chile confirms Paul Muldoon's stature as one of the most talented poets of his generation. The heart of the book is the long poem "Yarrow," in which Muldoon's powers of insight and wordplay and surprising association are on exuberant display: evoking the 1960s, the poet conjures up a boundless historical present peopled at once by Davy Crockett and Tristan Tzara and Wild Bill Hickok, by Maud Gonne and Michael Jackson, all bought swifly and vividly to life by his fantastical imagination. The collection also contains a group of shorter...
Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, The Annals of Chile confirms Paul Muldoon's stature as one of the most talented poets of his generation. The...
My heart is heavy. For I saw Fionnuala, "The Gem of the Roe," "The Flower of Sweet Strabane," when a girl reached down into a freezer bin to bring up my double scoop of vanilla. -"White Shoulders"
Seamus Heaney has called his colleague Paul Muldoon "one of the era's true originals." While Muldoon's previous book, The Annals of Chile, was poetry at an extreme of wordplay and formal complexity, Hay is made up of shorter, clearer lyric poems, retaining all of Muldoon's characteristic combination of wit and profundity but appealing to the reader in new and...
My heart is heavy. For I saw Fionnuala, "The Gem of the Roe," "The Flower of Sweet Strabane," when a girl reached down into a freezer bin
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...
Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heav...
Gathered by the renowned Irish poet, playwright, and essayist William Butler Yeats, the sixty-five tales and poems in this delightful collection uniquely capture the rich heritage of the Celtic imagination. Filled with legends of village ghosts, fairies, demons, witches, priests, and saints, these stories evoke both tender pathos and lighthearted mirth and embody what Yeats describes as "the very voice of the people, the very pulse of life." "The impact of these tales doesn't stop with Yeats, or Joyce, or Oscar Wilde," writes Paul Muldoon in his Foreword, "for generations of readers in...
Gathered by the renowned Irish poet, playwright, and essayist William Butler Yeats, the sixty-five tales and poems in this delightful collection uniqu...
Subtitled A Mystery, this verse narrative collects several poems concerning the so-called "Pantisocracy" (meaning a state ruled equally by all), a utopian scheme devised and later abandoned by the 18th-century poet-philosophers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. What if they had indeed set up such an ideal community on the banks of the Susquehanna? That is the crux of this book's long and fascinating title poem, which depicts events via the mind's eye of one of Southey's reputed descendants.
The poems in this book also focus more directly on the legend of Madoc...
Subtitled A Mystery, this verse narrative collects several poems concerning the so-called "Pantisocracy" (meaning a state ruled equally by a...
The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas contains poems that Thomas personally decided best represented his work. A year before its publication Thomas died from swelling of the brain triggered by excessive drinking. (A piece of New Directions history: it was our founder James Laughlin who identified Thomas' body at the morgue of St. Vincent's Hospital.) Since its initial publication in 1953, this book has become the definitive edition of the poet's work. Thomas wrote "Prologue" addressed to "my readers, the strangers" -- an introduction in verse that was the last poem he would ever write....
The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas contains poems that Thomas personally decided best represented his work. A year before its publication Th...
Of Plan B, which included several of the poems in Maggot, Robert McCrum recently said in the London Observer that "Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet's task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection." In his eleventh full-length book, 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...
Of Plan B, which included several of the poems in Maggot, Robert McCrum recently said in the London Observer that "Paul Muldoo...