Book description
Following his highly-praised Shining Brow (1993), which was also
written as an opera libretto for the American composer Daron Aric
Hagen, Paul Muldoon's 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.
Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He read English
at Queen's University, Belfast, and published his first collection of
poems, New Weather, in 1973. He is the author of ten books of poetry,
including Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he received the
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Horse Latitudes (2006). Since 1987 he
has lived in the United States, where he is the Howard G. B. Clark
Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. From 1999 to 2004
he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. A Fellow of the Royal
Society of Literature, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of
Arts and Letters award in 1996. Other recent awards include the 1994
T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, and the 2003
Griffin Prize.
