11/21/2016
A virtuoso since his student days in Northern Ireland, Muldoon (One Thousand Things Worth Knowing) has collected many of poetry’s most coveted trophies during his half-century-long career, including a Pulitzer Prize. This impressive yet approachable selection, replacing an earlier selected, offers an excellent introduction to his relentlessly crafted work. His early lyrics of rural life and the Irish Troubles have aged well: they remain as powerful and delicately wrought as the switch a boy makes for his own beatings in “Anseo.” Other poems slyly address political questions. “There is, surely, in this story/ a moral,” Muldoon writes in “The Frog,” asking about the eponymous amphibian, “What if I put him to my head/ and squeezed it out of him?” His more recent work is often death-haunted; its muses are maggots and turkey buzzards, and one poem’s refrain is literally “Too late.” But Muldoon leavens this morbidity with self-awareness and volubility, with the sincere wonder of the cosmopolitan. As he writes in “Cuthbert and the Otters,” his strange, moving requiem for Seamus Heaney, “The Benedictines still love a bit of banter/ along with the Beatitudes.” Equal parts bar crawl and blessing, formal adventure and shaggy dog, Muldoon’s work looks both backward and forward and finds new ways to rhyme them. (Dec.)
NPR Best Books of 2016
“[Selected Poems 1968-2014 is] a compact, powerful book, filled with catharses you didn’t know you needed . . . [Paul Muldoon] takes traditional verse forms—sonnets, sestinas, ballads, pantoums—and retools them, as if they were engine parts, for his own purposes.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Paul Muldoon’s Selected Poems 1968-2014 demonstrates why he has long been regarded as one of the most significant poets of the past fifty years . . . Muldoon displays the full range of his voice, which can be whimsical, melancholy, pensive, angry or delight in wordplay.” —Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post
"[Selected Poems 1968-2014] reveals, amid Muldoon's kaleidoscopic variations, the axiom underlying all his poetry . . . no contemporary poetry gives such immediate proof that extravagant contrivance is perfectly compatible with powerful feeling." —Christopher Spaide, Slate
"Muldoon has enfranchised a whole generation of poets, by freeing them into his own brand of linguistic euphoria. But what sets him apart from his imitators, and raises him above them, is his imaginative scope and daring . . . He is a fabulous poet." —Stephen Romer, The Guardian
"Over the past 45 years, acclaimed Irish poet Muldoon has authored more than 30 books, most recently, One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015). During this time, Muldoon has perfected his characteristic sense of wry understatement, penchant for sly allusions, and affinity for elliptical structures. Where some poets resist closure, Muldoon’s work seems to inhabit a paradoxical timelessness: imbued with a sense of history, yet also persistently present, where even mundane events prove momentous, like the birth of a foal or a harmless encounter with a hedgehog (“the god / Under this crown of thorns”). Many of Muldoon’s poems can be read as such whimsical run-ins, situated amid rural farmland under the “soiled grey blanket of Irish rain,” populated as it is with foxes, frogs, and quail. But with his unique voice, Muldoon is also master of the poetic epic, long narratives that read like lyrical novellas. As a selection of Muldoon’s most popular work, this volume is sure to include fan favorites, and will also provide new readers with a wide-ranging introduction to one of the most prolific and appreciated poets of contemporary English literature." —Diego Báez
"This impressive yet approachable selection . . . offers an excellent introduction to [Paul Muldoon's] relentlessly crafted work . . . Equal parts bar crawl and blessing, formal adventure and shaggy dog, Muldoon's work looks both backward and forward and finds new ways to rhyme them." —Publisher's Weekly
