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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 821
EAN: 9780374528843
ISBN: 0374528845
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 120
Publication Date: April 15, 2004
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sales Rank: 497579
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Obscure
Poetry is an art form that succeeds only if the reader can share with the poet a vision communicated by the poem. How this work won a pulitzer prize escapes me. The only way for an "outsider" the read this book is with an interpreter and a dictionary so the obscure, at least from my point of view, references can be appreciated. As a reader I get no sense of the images the writer wants to conjure and the poems fail to take me anywhere but to the cliff of reason where I am just left without a bridge ... Read More
Rating: - Solid collection best read after his previous three volumes
My rating does not mean this is average poetic work, only that by comparison to his last three collections, it less frequently reaches their daunting and rarified heights. It's actually a better place to start reading the "later" Muldoon, in fact. Domesticity has tamed a bit of the bravura evident in the arcane lore dazzling the other collections perhaps too much. Poems here like "Unapproved Road," mixing Taureg with IRA in its 1950s failed "border campaign," wittily contrast in a way that Muldoon warms ... Read More
Rating:  - Good Stuff
Here's a Muldoon pastiche:
Basement
Then to spy
in an unused cellar spot
Under a bulb fixture
long since jury-rigged
in deal cast-off
And between oil tank
and salt-scalloped stone wall
--Between a ruck
and a carapace--
A tiny skeleton--mouse.
My instinct:
to trip-tipsy the dark
--As even the Dean
and Cuchulain might--
fantastic.
[My opinion is that Muldoon peaked ... Read More
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Dewey Decimal Number: 821
EAN: 9780374528843
ISBN: 0374528845
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 120
Publication Date: April 15, 2004
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sales Rank: 497579
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux