Is there any living poet with as skilled . . . an ear? (McSweeney's). The answer resounds: Muldoon is a true original.

Since his 1973 debut, New Weather, Paul Muldoon has created some of the most original and memorable poetry of the past half century. Joy in Service on Rue Tagore sees him writing with the same verve and distinction that have consistently won him the highest accolades.

Here, from artichokes to zinc, Muldoon navigates an alphabet of image and history, through barleymen and Irish slavers to the last running wolf in Ulster. The search involves the accumulated bric-a-brac of a life, and a reckoning along the way of gains against loss. In the poet's skillful hands, ancient maps are unfurled and brought into focus--the aggregation of Imperial Rome and the dismantling of Standard Oil, the pogroms of a Ukrainian ravine and of a Belfast shipyard. Through modern medicine and warfare, disaster and repair, these poems are electric in their energy, while profoundly humane in their line of inquiry.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Moy Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon, the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War (The Times Literary Supplement).

Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay, finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which 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, flimflammers, 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.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet delivers a sharp wake-up call with his fourteenth collection.

A howdie-skelp is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It's a wake-up call. A call to action.

The poems in Howdie-Skelp, Paul Muldoon's astonishing collection, include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an affront to good taste. Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture but to hold our attention.

The most significant English-Language poet born since the second world war. --The Times Literary Supplement

Selected Poems 1968-2014 offers forty-six years of work drawn from twelve individual collections by a poet who began as a prodigy and has gone on to become a virtuoso (Michael Hofmann). Hailed by Seamus Heaney as one of the era's true originals, Paul Muldoon seems determined to escape definition, yet this volume, compiled by the poet himself, serves as an indispensable introduction to his trademark combination of intellectual hijinks and emotional honesty. Among his many honors are the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Shakespeare Prize for contributions from English-speaking Europe to the European inheritance.

Among contemporaries, Paul Muldoon, one of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems--word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy. And angry. Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury. --Roger Rosenblatt, The New York Times

My heart is heavy. For I saw Fionnuala,
The Gem of the Roe, The Flower of Sweet Strabane,
when a girl reached down into a freezer bin
to bring up my double scoop of vanilla.
-White Shoulders

Seamus Heaney has called his colleague Paul Muldoon one of the era's true originals. While Muldoon's previous book, The Annals of Chile, was poetry at an extreme of wordplay and formal complexity, Hay is made up of shorter, clearer lyric poems, retaining all of Muldoon's characteristic combination of wit and profundity but appealing to the reader in new and delightful ways. His eighth book, it is also his most inviting-full of joy in language, fascination with popular culture, and enthusiasm for the writing of poetry itself. This is the first of his books to really capture the effect of America on his poetic sensibility, which is like a magnet for impressions and the miscellany of the culture.

Subtitled A Mystery, this verse narrative collects several poems concerning the so-called Pantisocracy (meaning a state ruled equally by all), a utopian scheme devised and later abandoned by the 18th-century poet-philosophers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. What if they had indeed set up such an ideal community on the banks of the Susquehanna? That is the crux of this book's long and fascinating title poem, which depicts events via the mind's eye of one of Southey's reputed descendants.

The poems in this book also focus more directly on the legend of Madoc himself, the Welsh prince who some believe came to America 300 years before Columbus and sired a line of Welsh-speaking Indians.

Drawn from Hong Kong International Poetry Nights 2011, The Ancestor is a chapbook of poetry by Paul Muldoon presented in both English and Chinese. The Ancestor is also available along with the works of other internationally renowned poets in Words and the World (Twenty-volume Set). Selected poems from this volume are featured in the anthology Words and the World: International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong.

Another wild, expansive collection from the eternally surprising Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

Smuggling diesel; Ben-Hur (the movie, yes, but also Lew Wallace's original book, and Seosamh Mac Grianna's Gaelic translation); a real trip to Havana; an imaginary trip to the Château d'If: Paul Muldoon's newest collection of poems, his twelfth, is exceptionally wide-ranging in its subject matter--as we've come to expect from this master of self-reinvention. He can be somber or quick-witted--often within the same poem: The mournful refrain of Cuthbert and the Otters is I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead, but that doesn't stop Muldoon from quipping that the ancient Danes are already dyeing everything beige / In anticipation, perhaps, of the carpet and mustard factories.

If this masterful, multifarious collection does have a theme, it is watchfulness. War is to wealth as performance is to appraisal, he warns in Recalculating. And Source is to leak as Ireland is to debt. Heedful, hard-won, head-turning, heartfelt, these poems attempt to bring scrutiny to bear on everything, including scrutiny itself. One Thousand Things Worth Knowing confirms Nick Laird's assessment, in The New York Review of Books, that Muldoon is the most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets, an experimenter and craftsman who writes poems like no one else.

The title of Horse Latitudes, Paul Muldoon's tenth collection of poetry, refers to those areas thirty degrees north and south of the equator where sailing ships tend to be becalmed, where stasis (if not stagnation) is the order of the day.

From Bosworth Field to Beijing, the Boyne to Bull Run, from a series of text messages to the nineteenth-century Irish poet Thomas Moore to an elegy for Warren Zevon, and from post-Agreement Ireland to George W. Bush's America, this book presents us with fields of battle and fields of debate, in which we often seem to have come to a standstill but in which language that has been debased may yet be restruck and made current to our predicament. Horse Latitudes is a triumphant collection by one of the most esteemed poets of our time.

Ireland
The Volkswagen parked in the gap,
But gently ticking over.
You wonder if it's lovers
And not men hurrying back
Across two fields and a river.

Sven Birkerts has said, It is not usual for a poet of Muldoon's years to have . . . an oeuvre disclosing significant shifts and evolutions. But Muldoon, more than most, is an artist in high flight from self-repetition and the deadening business of living up to created expectations. The body of work in Poems 1968-1998 -- a comprehensive gathering of Paul Muldoon's eight volumes -- finds a great poet reinventing himself at every turn. Muldoon's career thus far shows us a fascinatingly mutable climate in which each freshening period brings -- as his first collection was predictively titled -- new weather.

A new collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

Though Frolic and Detour is Paul Muldoon's thirteenth collection, it shows all the energy and ambition we might generally associate with a first book. Here, the poet brings his characteristic humor and humanity to the chickadee, the house wren, the deaths of Leonard Cohen and C. K. Williams, the Irish Rising, the Great War, and how a streak of ragwort / may yet shine / as an off-the-record / remark becomes the party line.

Frolic and Detour reminds us that the sidelong glance is the sweetest, the tangential approach the most telling, and shows us why Paul Muldoon was described by Nick Laird, writing in The New York Review of Books, as the most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets, who] writes poems like no one else.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet delivers a sharp wake-up call with his fourteenth collection.

A howdie-skelp is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It's a wake-up call. A call to action.

The poems in Howdie-Skelp, Paul Muldoon's new collection, include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a heroic crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an affront to good taste. Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture but to command our attention.

Of Plan B, which included several of the poems in Maggot, Robert McCrum recently said in the London Observer that Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet's task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection. In his eleventh full-length book, Muldoon reminds us that he is a traditional poet who is steadfastly at odds with tradition. If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn't your father's poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W. B. Yeats's remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are sex and the dead, Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It's no accident that the centerpiece of Maggot is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its subject the urge to memorialize the scenes of fatal automobile accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title sequence but also many of the round songs that characterize Maggot, and has led Angela Leighton, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, to see these new poems as giving readers a thrilling, wild, fairground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish.

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, The Annals of Chile confirms Paul Muldoon's stature as one of the most talented poets of his generation. The heart of the book is the long poem Yarrow, in which Muldoon's powers of insight and wordplay and surprising association are on exuberant display: evoking the 1960s, the poet conjures up a boundless historical present peopled at once by Davy Crockett and Tristan Tzara and Wild Bill Hickok, by Maud Gonne and Michael Jackson, all bought swifly and vividly to life by his fantastical imagination. The collection also contains a group of shorter poems, including The Birth, a delicate lyric which celebrates the arrival of a baby girl; Incantata, a deeply felt elegy to a former lover; a Muldoon's inspired adaptation of an episode from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

This book asks a deceptively simple question: what are states actually doing when they do penance for past injustices? Why are these penitential gestures - especially the gesture of apology - becoming so ubiquitous and what implications do they carry for the way power is exercised?

Drawing on the work of Schmitt, Foucault and Agamben, the book argues that there is more at stake in sovereign acts of repentance and redress than either the recognition of the victims or the legitimacy of the state. Driven, it suggests, by an interest in 'healing', such acts testify to a new biopolitical raison d'état in which the management of trauma emerges as a critical expression of attempts to regulate the life of the population.

The Penitent State seeks to show that the key issue created by the 'age of apology' is not whether sovereign acts of repentance and redress are sincere or insincere, but whether the political measures licensed in the name of healing deserve to be regarded as either restorative or just.

All Kavanagh's gifts are on display, as Paul Muldoon writes in his introduction to this new selection of 40 poems spanning 30 years of Patrick Kavanagh's career. In truth, these gifts were hard-won, from his earliest self-taught verses after leaving primary school at the age of 13, to his refusal of sanitized pastoral depictions of rural Ireland while living among Dublin's literary elite, to his transcendent later poems written in the wake of an operation to remove one of his lungs after a cancer diagnosis. Throughout his life, Patrick Kavanagh would carve out a place for himself as one of Ireland's most important poets with what Muldoon calls the documentarian's eye and ear for the everyday technical term. Gathered here are among his best and best-known poems, beginning with some of his earliest publications in 1930 and continuing chronologically into the 1960s with essentials from his career, as well as highlights left unpublished during his lifetime. The Great Hunger, often considered his major achievement, is presented as a centerpiece alongside Lough Derg, a poem of nearly equal length and possibly equal, though unrecognized, importance. Paul Muldoon presents his selection with a characteristically deft introduction, weaving biographical details into new ways of looking at Kavanagh's life and lasting legacy of finding a star-lovely art / In a dark sod.

In the introduction to his selection of some of the greatest sonnets ever written, Paul Muldoon reminds us that part of the reason for the 'durability' of the sonnet is its 'very specific duration'. It is the perfect length for what Dante Gabriel Rossetti described as 'a moment's monument' or William Wordsworth as a 'scanty plot of ground' offering 'brief solace' for those who 'have felt the weight of too much liberty'. Among the poets included in this centuries-spanning edition are Elizabeth Bishop, Wanda Coleman, John Donne, Terrance Hayes, John Keats, Claude McKay, Edna St Vincent Millay, Christina Rossetti, William Shakespeare, Patricia Smith and W. B. Yeats. There are also translations by Muldoon of sonnets by Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke and César Vallejo, as well as the duo of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.

Is there any living poet with as skilled . . . an ear? (McSweeney's). The answer resounds: Muldoon is a true original.

Since his 1973 debut, New Weather, Paul Muldoon has created some of the most original and memorable poetry of the past half century. Joy in Service on Rue Tagore sees him writing with the same verve and distinction that have consistently won him the highest accolades.

Here, from artichokes to zinc, Muldoon navigates an alphabet of image and history, through barleymen and Irish slavers to the last running wolf in Ulster. The search involves the accumulated bric-a-brac of a life, and a reckoning along the way of gains against loss. In the poet's skillful hands, ancient maps are unfurled and brought into focus--the aggregation of Imperial Rome and the dismantling of Standard Oil, the pogroms of a Ukrainian ravine and of a Belfast shipyard. Through modern medicine and warfare, disaster and repair, these poems are electric in their energy, while profoundly humane in their line of inquiry.

In The End of the Poem, Paul Muldoon dazzlingly explores a diverse group of poems, from Yeats's All Souls' Night to Stevie Smith's I Remember to Fernando Pessoa's Autopsychography. Muldoon reminds us that the word poem comes, via French, from the Latin and Greek: a thing made or created. He asks: Can a poem ever be a free-standing structure, or must it always interface with the whole of its author's bibliography--and biography? Muldoon explores the boundlessness created by influence, what Robert Frost meant when he insisted that the way to read a poem in prose or verse is in the light of all the other poems ever written.

Finally, Muldoon returns to the most fruitful, and fraught, aspect of the phrase the end of the poem the interpretation that centers on the aim or function of a poem, and the question of whether or not the end of the poem is the beginning of criticism. Irreverent and deeply learned, The End of the Poem is a vigorous approach to looking at poetry anew.

Poetry. Music. This particular pamphlet is beautifully designed, printed on high-stock paper, with a proper spine and an ultra-cool cover. It features over 16 punk-rock-style song lyrics--zany, witty, brilliant, sometimes startling --by the master poet of songs played by his band, Rogue Oliphant. An album/LP is to follow (not from Eyewear). At a time when the Nobel is recognising the beauty and value of lyrics as a form of literature, here comes a great contender...