Book description
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.
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.
