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Amazon.com's Price: $15.00 Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN: 9780374526191
ISBN: 0374526192
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 144
Publication Date: September 10, 1999
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sales Rank: 240260
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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 bin
to 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.
Amazon.com Review:
Though Paul Muldoon's voice is thoroughly his own, a taste for turbulent rhythms and fantastical journeys firmly links him with some of our finest poets, most notably Coleridge. In 'The Mud Room,' the start of this stunning collection, the speaker juxtaposes wildly dissimilar images--Pharaohs and Kikkoman soy sauce, Virgil's Georgics and 'cardboard boxes from K-Mart,' ziggurats and six-packs. Why? Because in piecing together the whole of our collective human past--the past of Jackson Browne's 'The Pretender' on the same page as the past of Epicurus--Muldoon casts a vote for inclusion, a vote against exclusivity and relegation. He travels far to show such close relations. Rather than focus on differences, we're forced to consider a resemblance between rock stars and Pharaohs, and in turn a grander likeness that joins us all.
But in drawing together common connective strands of history, culture, and emotion, Muldoon is anything but general. His language is highly original and searching. He doesn't merely sniff dispassionately at the 'otherness' of words; like an excited hound that has discovered the scent of another animal, he rolls vigorously in it--and makes it his own:
So a harum-scarum
bushman, hey, would slash one forearm
with a flint, ho, or a sliver of steel
till it flashed, hey ho, like a hel-
iograph.
These poems resonate with an easy coexistence of the ordinary and the exotic. Whether he's penning rhymed haiku (rhymed haiku?) about placid farm life ('None more dishevelled / than those who seemed most demure. / Our rag-weed revels') or quatrains about Cracow ('Into the Vistula swollen with rain / you and I might have plunged and found a way / to beat out the black grain / as our forefathers did on threshing day'), Muldoon's words gleam like jewels unearthed from everyday mud. --Martha Silano
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Clearer (relatively speaking) and a bit more accessible
...Than Muldoon's other recent volumes. Not to say it's an easy read. Bits of the Irish language, proverbs, Celtic legend, Japanese and native American lore, Hiberno-English, allusions and elisions packed with every poem, this collection does echo, as the publisher's blurb suggests, a bit of Muldoon's adapted state of New Jersey's forebear William Carlos Williams at times. His translations of the old Irish verse Pangur Ban and two Rilke poems show that he's skilled at rendering into solidity other ... Read More
Rating:  - Hay?
An Irish Professor at Princeton, Paul Muldoon wrote a book called "Hay". Muldoon is said to be one of the most inventive poets of this day and age. Paul Muldoon seemingly is so unpredictable at times that he stirs up problems with his readers and critics. Muldoon's 90 Haiku is just an example of his unique works. Muldoon has the ability to create a poem out of anything, but instead on enlightening his readers, he tends to confuse them.
In "Hopewell ... Read More
Rating:  - Delightful
I enjoyed the opportunity of hearing a reading by Paul Muldoon last spring and this semester I'm taking a writing of poetry class. I had to do a presentation on a living poet and I picked up one of his latest collections and it's like the title of this review, delightful. There are so many different styles of eccentric poems in this one collection and some that contain such obscure literary references that it invokes a sense of bewilderment and leads to a trail of website-hunting to figure out what ... Read More
Rating: - Great book. Absolutely wonderful. Buy it.
Great book. Absolutely wonderful. Buy it.
(I had written a longer, more interesting review, but it was apparently lost on the web.)
Rating: - Mr. Muldoon's Neighborhood
Is it possible for one person to be the best American poet and the best Irish poet at the same time? Muldoon certainly lays a strong claim to both titles: his Irishness lends him a musicality far superior to that achieved by most contemporary Americans, while his American side is the source of a far-ranging brashness, an ambition, scope and post- modern adventurousness that makes many Irish poets look rather, well, staid. "Hay" is a brave and experimental volume, more Byronic than ironic (though ... Read More
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Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN: 9780374526191
ISBN: 0374526192
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 144
Publication Date: September 10, 1999
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sales Rank: 240260
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux