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Poems 1968 1998

Poems 1968 1998
By P Muldoon

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Product Description

Yet my eye is drawn once again,
Almost against its wishes,
To the figure in the shadows,
Willowy, and clean-shaven,
As if he simply wandered in
Between mending that fuse
And washing the breakfast dishes.
--from "The Bearded Woman, by Ribera"

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 and recreating the business of poetry. The thirty-year effort of Muldoon's career thus far, is altogether like a fascinatingly mutable climate in which each freshening period brings---as his first collection was predictively titled---new weather.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #762435 in Books
  • Published on: 2001-04-01
  • Original language: English
  • Dimensions: 1.59" h x 6.27" w x 9.26" l, 1.87 pounds
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 480 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The best, most-honored Irish poet of the generation after Heaney, "the man who could rhyme knife with fork" (as another poet quipped), Muldoon finds his collected work seeing print a few months before his 50th birthday not bad for a farmer's son from Armagh. Though it includes no new poems, this big brick of a volume does make available several long-out-of-print early books, and it serves better than Muldoon's older selecteds to reveal the full range of his prodigious talents. There is the Frostian, anecdotal Muldoon of early work like "The Big House": "I was only the girl under the stairs/ But I was the first to notice something was wrong." There is the evasive, tough-guy Muldoon who wrote narrative poems, like "The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants," about terror and gangsters in his native Ulster. There is the brilliantly canny and understatedly moving family elegist. There is the Muldoon whose oeuvre includes all shades of romantic and erotic emotion, from sexual disgust ("Aisling") to long-married tenderness ("Long Finish"). There is the writer of serious, terse, effective political verse, the author of 100 haiku about suburban New Jersey, and the Muldoon who recreated the sonnet in his own image. And, most famously, there is the postmodern comic, who claims to be "my own stunt double," and who explains in another recent poem: "A bird in the hand is better than no bread./ To have your cake is to pay Paul." Muldoon (who now teaches at Princeton and Oxford) may yet expand his range even further; for now, the Muldoons are all here, in force and in bulk. Most readers of poetry will need to deal with them. (Apr.) Forecast: The eight or so separate Muldoon volumes on the shelves had the effect of putting off first-time readers, and making a diverse body of work seem diffuse. This collection corrects both problems, and makes Muldoon's first half-century a one-shot buy for libraries and consumers alike. If reviewers take this chance to sum up the career, this book could put Muldoon in Heaney's neighborhood.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Carlos Fuentes claims the English language's luck consists of someone Irish coming along every generation or so and reinventing it. Muldoon--reared in Northern Ireland, long resident at Princeton, recently professor of poetry at Oxford--is today's reinventor. His language is heightened, experimental, and also utterly mundane, even coarse. His subjects match the language, what with trips on mescaline chockablock with bucolic landscapes. The luck of this collection is that it is long and dense enough to show the poet wrestling not only with craft--his intricate and often hidden rhymes show, right from the start, his obsession with form--but also with the reason for poetry in a technological age. In an early poem Muldoon describes meeting with a younger poet "rambling on / About pigs and trees, stars and horses"--this is Muldoon's own younger self come calling, challenging him to move beyond the conventional poetic subjects. The trees and stars never utterly disappear, though, but arrive in movies and French philosophy, pub crawls and Romantic poets, Irish language and Belfast murders, in a great swirl of fresh and durable language, as if they were bedrock revealed by a cataclysm. Patricia Monaghan
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About the Author

Paul Muldoon was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. He lives with his wife, the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz, and their two children in New Jersey, and teaches at Princeton University. In 1999, he was elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.