Book description
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY 2003 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, 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 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, 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 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.
