Bøger af Paul Muldoon

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature.She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellowed to that tender lightWhich heaven to gaudy day denies.-- She Walks in Beauty

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 Paul Muldoon's striking new 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. Paul Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture, but to hold 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."

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.

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.

Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), 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, un 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. Moy Sand and Gravel is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

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 binto 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.

The Annals of Chile, Paul Muldoon's first book of new poetry since the acclaimed Madoc: A Mystery (1991), confirms the widely held view that he is the most talented poet of his generation. The heart of the book is the long poem "Yarrow", in which all 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 brought swiftly and vividly to life by his fantastical imagination. The book also contains a group of shorter poems, including "The Birth", a delicate lyric which celebrates the arrival of a baby daughter; "Incantata", a powerful elegy to a former lover; and Muldoon's inspired adaptation of an episode from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Art, Muldoon writes, "builds from pain, from misery, from a deep-seated hurt / a monument to the human heart"; and here, out of strong emotion, in memorable language, Muldoon has once again fashioned rich and vital poetry.

Selected Poems 1968-2014 offers forty-five 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', Muldoon seems determined to escape definition yet this volume, chosen by the poet himself, serves as an indispensable introduction to his trademark combination of intellectual high jinx and emotional honesty. Among his many honours are the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Shakespeare Prize 'for contributions from English-speaking Europe to the European inheritance.'

In this selection from five years' worth of lyrics, accompanied by recent sonnets, Paul Muldoon recalls the bardic traditions of his homeland where songs and poems exist somewhere in between Parnassus and Tin Pan Alley.

Paul Muldoon's new book, his twelfth collection of poems, is wide-ranging in its subject matter yet is everywhere concerned with watchfulness. 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 Paul Muldoon is 'the most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets, [who] writes poems like no one else.'

In this new collection Paul Muldoon goes back to the essential meaning of the term 'lyric' -a short poem sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument. These words are written for music, assuredly, with half an ear to Yeats's ballad-singing porter drinkers and half to Cole Porter-and indeed, many of them double as rock songs, performed by the Wayside Shrines, the Princeton-based music collective of which Muldoon is a member. Their themes are the classic themes of song: lost love, lost wars, Charlton Heston, barbed wire, pole dancers, cellulite, Hegel, elephants, Oedipus, more barbed wire, Buddy Holly, Jersey peaches, Julius Caesar, Trenton, cockatoos, and the Youngers (Bob and John and Jim and Cole).The Word on the Street is a lively addition to this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's masterful body of work. It demonstrates, once again, that, as Richard Eder has written in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, 'Paul Muldoon is a shape-shifting Proteus to readers who try to pin him down . . . Those who interrogate Muldoon's poems find themselves changing shapes each time he does.'

In his eleventh full-length collection, Paul 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 car accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title-sequence but many of the round-songs that characterize Maggot and has led Angela Leighton, writing in the TLS, to see these new poems (on their earlier appearance in Plan B, an interim volume which included several of the poems in Maggot) as giving readers 'a thrilling, wild, fairground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish.'

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY 2003Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, where 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, flim-flammers, 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.

Meeting the British is Paul Muldoon's fifth collection of poems. They range from an account of the first recorded case of germ wafare, though a meditation on a bar of soap, to a sequence of monologues spoken by some of the famous, or infamous, inhabitants of '7, Middagh Street,', New York, on Thanksgiving Day, 1940.

Why Brownlee Left, Paul Muldoon's third collection, was published in 1980.

The End of the Poem contains the fifteen lectures delivered by Paul Muldoon as Oxford Professor of Poetry, from 1999 to 2004. Rather than individual and discrete performances, these lectures form a dazzling set of variations around the sustained theme of 'the end of the poem'. Each lecture explores a different sense of an ending: whether a poem can ever be a free-standing structure, read and written in isolation from other poems; whether a poem's line-endings are forms of closure (and where this might leave the poem in prose); whether the poem is completed only with the reader's act of understanding; whether revision brings a poem nearer to its ideal ending (when does a poet know when a poem has come to an end?); what is the right true end of poetry, and is the end of the poem the beginning of criticism, including an Arnoldian 'criticism of life'?

The four pieces that make up this work are taken from Muldoon's Oxford Clarendon Lectures of 1998. Together, they take the form of an A-Z, or abecedary of Irish literature, in which his imagination forges links between disparate aspects and individuals in the Irish literary landscape, ranging back and forth between modern and medieval. From Beckett and Bowen, through MacNeice, Swift and Yeats - and guided throughout by Joyce - To Ireland, I moves lightly through the long grass of Irish writing. The result is a provocative handbook for the literary traveller, who is treated to an astonishing display of scholarship and idiosyncratic inwardness from Irish literature over the course of a millennium.

Paul Muldoon's new collection opens with a sonnet sequence, 'Horse Latitudes', written as the U.S. embarked on its foray into Iraq. Poems on historical battles where horses played an important part present us with a commentary on the political agenda of America today.

In this volume, poet John Kinsella presents a selection of Paul Muldoon's most linguistically innovative and overtly `experimental' poems. Kinsella's introduction explores the complex politics of language and the dissection of `New World'-`Old World' (false) verbal dynamics that inform Muldoon's writing.