Review
"'Among discriminating readers of new poetry, no one's stock is any higher than Paul Muldoon's...For sheer fun, verve, wickedness and grace, he has no rivals.' Michael Hofmann, The Times Drawing on Paul Muldoon's eight major collections, Poems 1968-1998 allows readers old and new to take the full measure of the writer whose 'influence on the otherwise torpid aesthetics of post-war poetry alone makes him the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War.' (Stephen Knight, Times Literary Supplement) 'Muldoon's technical resources - his formal imagination, range of allusion, lexical abundance and rhyming panache - have only expanded with the years, and the wit that deploys them is sharper than ever.' Mick Imlah, Observer 'No other poet now writing charts so gracefully that narrow track between open and closed form, tradition and innovation.' Michael Donaghy, Sunday Times"
Product Description
Drawing on Paul Muldoon's eight major collections ("New Weather", "Mules", "Why Brownlee Left", "Quoof", "Meeting the British", "Madoc: A Mystery", "The Annals of Chile", and "Hay") "Poems 1968-1998" allows readers old and new to take the full measure of this significant poet.
About the Author
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.
Excerpted from Poems 1968-1998 by Paul Muldoon. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
The Boundary Commission
You remember that village where the border ran
Down the middle of the street,
With the butcher and baker in different states?
Today he remarked how a shower of rain
Had stopped so cleanly across Golightly's lane
It might have been a wall of glass
That had toppled over. He stood there, for ages,
To wonder which side, if any, he should be on.