- Hardcover: 158 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press (30 Mar 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0198184751
- ISBN-13: 978-0198184751
- Product Dimensions: 22.6 x 14.4 x 2 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,415,182 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
To Ireland, I
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Product Description
Review
Some poets who turn their hand to criticism adopt a sober academic guise, as if to atone for their verbal transgressions. Paul Muldoon is not one of them. Clair Wills Muldoon's kind of word-weaving is a joy to behold ... It is refreshing to read this tricksy collection of four lectures delivered by the current Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Paul Muldoon, because he is way offside, bouncing around with every kind of hunch, suggestion, allusion, illusion, might-have-been, might-be, entertaining some relation or guess, conjuring up whatever association or downright dodgy possibility that is imaginable. Gerald Dowe, Irish Times, 4/3/00
Book Description
This reissue of Paul Muldoon's exceptional debut as a critic and literary historian is a brilliant exploration of Irish writing.
--This text refers to the
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First Sentence
I begin at the beginning-'like an old ballocks, can you imagine that?'-with the first poems by the first poet of Ireland. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
I begin at the beginning-'like an old ballocks, can you imagine that?'-with the first poems by the first poet of Ireland. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Great poets are not always great critics
1 Aug 2000
Format:Hardcover
I am bemused and rather disappointed with this book. Muldoon uses intertextual associativeness to generate wonderful poems -- touching, comic, and stylistically breath-taking. Here he uses the same method in a critical rhapsody that links together a galaxy of Irish literary texts and legends, arranged (or disarranged) in alphabetical order. He moves freely and funnily between Gaelic and English, ancient and modern, biographical and textual. The performance is carried off with brio, in a manner that recalls certain experiments in randomness of Roland Barthes. Unfortunately, many of the allusions Muldoon finds are so farfetched as to make one wince as at a bad pun. He circles around Joyce's "The Dead," adding one or two valid observations to what allusion-hunters have already noted, but otherwise sending readers off on a wild goose chase. Unlike Seamus Heaney, who is a great, authoritative, and highly trained literary critic, Muldoon does not project from his distinctive poetic sensibility a capacious literary critical vision. He flogs to death the idea of "conglomewriting" as a distinctively Irish practice, culminating in Finnegans Wake, but he offers little serious reflection on what the literary value of this practice might be. For that one must turn to works like Gerard Genette's Palimpsestes, which offers a careful and thorough examination of the ancient art of intertextual composition. Professorial pedants will find consolation in the thought that poets may need their services after all.
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