Paul Muldoon

“A Meteor of Intelligent Substance” “Something was Missing in our Culture, and Here It Is” “Liberties sure is needed in these times.”In a short time since its launch, Liberties - A Journal of Culture and Politics, a quarterly, has become essential reading for those engaged in the cultural and political issues and causes of our time. The writers in Liberties offer deep experience from across borders, national identities, political affiliations and artistic achievements. As the introductory essay in the inaugural edition noted, “At this journal we are betting on what used to be called the common reader, who would rather reflect than belong and asks of our intellectual life more than a choice between orthodoxies.” Each issue of Liberties features original in-depth essays and compelling new poetry from some of the world's most significant writers, artists, and scholars, as well as introducing new talent, to inspire and impact the intellectual and creative lifeblood of today’s culture and politics. This spring issue of Liberties includes: Giles Kepel on the Murder of Samuel Paty; Ingrid Rowland’s Long Live the Classics!; Vladimir Kara-Murza Surviving Putin’s Poisons; Paul Starr on Reckoning with National Failure from Covid; Becca Rothfeld on Today's Sanctimony Literature; Enrique Krauze explores What is Latin America?; William Deresiewicz on Why Great Visual Art Forces Us to Think; Benjamin Moser on Rediscovering Frans Hals; David Nirenberg on What We Can Learn from Earlier Plagues; Agnes Callard’s view of Romance without Love, Love without Romance; Mitchell Abidor looks back to “Social Media” in 1895 to Understand a Crowd’s “Wisdom”; The Tallis Scholars' Peter Phillips on the Secrets of Josquin; David Thomson on Movies’ Poetic Desire; Poetry from Henri Cole, Chaim Nachman Bialik, and Paul Muldoon; and, Leon Wieseltier (editor) asks "Where Are the Americans?” and Celeste Marcus (managing editor) writes for a Pluralistic Heart.

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 C sar Vallejo, as well as the duo of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.

Though the three lectures given by Paul Muldoon as Ireland Professor of Poetry focus on three former holders of the chair - John Montague, Michael Longley, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill - they also touch on a dizzying range of topics including David Byrne, Claddagh Records, decapitation, The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel, factory farming, Pierce Ferriter, incest among royals, Ivar the Boneless, James Joyce's "The Dead", Carl Jung, long addition, the Royston crow, Section 21 of the Broadcasting Act of Ireland, The Story of Mac Datho's Pig, The Voyage of Muldoon, war crimes by major poets, and the overly excitable Warren Zevon. The Ireland Chair of Poetry was established in 1998 following the award of the Nobel Prize of Literature to Seamus Heaney and is supported by Queen's University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Arts Council An Chomhairle Ealaion. Other poets in the series include Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, John Montague, Paul Durcan, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Michael Longley, Harry Clifton and Paula Meehan.

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.

A collection of Michael Longley's greatest poems, spanning an extraordinary career of sixty years as one of the Belfast triumverate, alongside Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon'One of the world's greats' IRISH NEWS'A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders' SEAMUS HEANEYThe title of Michael Longley’s New Selected Poems is taken from his poem ‘Ash Keys’. The wing-shaped, wind-borne seeds of the ash-tree might be an image for poems in search of their readers. This selection, based on thirteen individual collections, represents Longley’s unusual range as a lyric poet.It shows how his themes, genres and forms have evolved and interlaced since the 1960s. Love, violence, the natural world, art, psychodrama, family, the Great War, the Homeric past and Northern Ireland’s troubled present cohabit in these pages – as do depth, wit and beauty.'His work is of the level that would be befitting of a Novel Prize for Literature' MICHAEL D HIGGINS'Michael Longley’s latest lines are just as restless and as promising as his first' Times Literary Supplement

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE'To describe Paul Muldoon's influence on contemporary poetry is like trying to assess the influence of The Beatles on post-war music: it's to be seen and heard in the work of almost every British and Irish poet since the 1970's.' Irish PostSince his debut, New Weather (1973), 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 the highest accolades.Here, from artichokes to zinc, he 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 skilful 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 enquiry.'Truly, is there any living poet with as skilled and rambunctious an ear as Paul Muldoon? . . . One of the pleasures of Muldoon's poems is the way they make reality seem to go right to the verge of surrealism, the very shaky lip of it.' Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE'To describe Paul Muldoon's influence on contemporary poetry is like trying to assess the influence of The Beatles on post-war music: it's to be seen and heard in the work of almost every British and Irish poet since the 1970's.' Irish PostSince his debut, New Weather (1973), 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 the highest accolades.Here, from artichokes to zinc, he 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 skilful 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 enquiry.'Truly, is there any living poet with as skilled and rambunctious an ear as Paul Muldoon? . . . One of the pleasures of Muldoon's poems is the way they make reality seem to go right to the verge of surrealism, the very shaky lip of it.' Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's

SHORTLISTED FOR THE POETRY PIGOTT PRIZE IN ASSOCIATION WITH LISTOWEL WRITERS' WEEKThe hard-hitting new poetry collection from 'Ireland's most ingenious poet' (Telegraph).'Very few poets, living or otherwise, can combine high-speed wit, tongue-twisting alliteration and dizzying rhyme with the kind of insight that makes us pause, laugh, remember; feel envious, out of breath, punch-drunk.' Kit Fan, GuardianA '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.

New Weather was Paul Muldoon's first book of poems. When it appeared in 1973, Seamus Heaney described its author as 'unusually gifted, endowed with an individual sense of rhythm, a natural and copious vocabulary, a technical accomplishment and an intellectual boldness that mark him as the most promising poet to appear in Ireland for years'. While the promise has been amply fulfilled, this new paperback edition gives Muldoon's many, more recent admirers the opportunity to see what a versatile and substantial artist he was from the outset.

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.

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.

Although Frolic and Detour is Paul Muldoon's thirteenth book, it has all the passion and provocation we more often associate with a first collection. Ranging as it does from poems that take as their subject matter the Native American leaders Joseph Brant and Mangas Coloradas, through the Great War, the Irish Rising, hunting with eagles, the house wren, all the way to the day-to-day assault of twenty-first-century America, Frolic and Detour reminds us that the sidelong glance is the sweetest, the tangential approach the most telling. It also confirms Dwight Garner's assessment of Selected Poems 1968-2014 in the New York Times: 'a compact, powerful book, filled with catharses you didn't know you needed'.

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.

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."

”Förstklassigt aloeträ” är titeln på en dikt Paul Muldoon skrev till Leonard Cohens minne och som är en av flera elegier som ingår i detta nya urval som ger prov på Muldoons tematiska och tekniska mångsidighet. Boken fördjupar och förnyar bilden av ­Muldoons nu omfattande produktion. Här ingår dikter som skildrar hans uppväxt på den nord­irländska landsbygden, en berömd sonettsekvens som med halsbrytande teknik och virtuos förmåga att återanvända politikens och journalistikens floskler beskriver oroligheternas Nordirland och nya dikter som rör hundraårsminnet av påskupproret 1916. Men det finns också personliga dikter riktade till familj och nära vänner och en magnifik hyllningsdikt till Muldoons vän, förebild och rival, 1995 års nobelpristagare Seamus Heaney.

Illuminating the parallel and overlapping careers and relationships of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, this catalogue juxtaposes the two poets with unique material on view for the first time. With essays by biographer Paul Mariani, poets Paul Muldoon and Daniel Halpern, and collector Alan Klein, it represents a remarkable opportunity for understanding the overlapping careers of Stevens and Williams, their development as poets, the progression of their reputations, and the development of American Modernism.

Meeting the British is Paul Muldoon's fifth collection of poems. They range from an account of the first recorded case of germ warfare, through 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.

Roger Rosenblatt, writing in the New York Times in 2016, described Paul Muldoon as `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.’ This is a selection (chosen by poet John Kinsella) of some of the more linguistically innovative and overtly 'experimental' poems from Muldoon’s extensive and verbally rich oeuvre. Muldoon is always innovative and `electric’, but the focus in this selection is on linguistic `departures’ in his own practice. Both inside and outside the avant-garde, Muldoon is ultimately a maverick whose unique voice is nonetheless steeped in the politics of a bilingual Irish poetics, with a forensic dissection of `New World’–`Old World’ (false) verbal dynamics. We see and hear his poems in juxtaposition and proximity, in terms of those elements of his work that are possibly less appreciated and discussed by those who cast him as a lyrical purist who 'plays' with language. Muldoon’s is a poetry that is compelled, propelled and is 'political' in complex arrays, and isn't about `gameplay’ per se, but a politics of language. Muldoon has a driving purpose in all he writes, and the reader and listener may begin to get a sense of the possibilities of this purpose through engaging with this book.

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