Muldoon, Paul

New York. 2002. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket . 0374214808. 107 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Gretchen Achilles. Jacket painting: The Fox (1937), by John Luke (1906-75). keywords: Poetry Ireland Literature. FROM THE PUBLISHER - 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, 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 most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War.' - The Times Literary Supplement. ‘Among the few significant poets of our half-century.' - Tim Kendall, The Guardian. inventory #38051 ISBN: 0374214808.