Howdie-Skelp: Poems

by Paul Muldoon

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374602956
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	11/16/2021
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	679,583
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He now lives in New York. A former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, he has taught at Princeton University for thirty years. He is the author of over a dozen previous collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize; Selected Poems 1968–2014; and Frolic and Detour.

Table of Contents

Wagtail 3

American Standard 4

A Ruin 42

Shoot 'Em Up 44

Damsons 45

Bramleys, Not Grenadiers 53

23 Banned Poems 54

The Dirty Protest 89

A Postcard from Saint Bart's 92

Mayday 94

Anonymous: The Vikings 96

Clegs and Midges 97

The Fly 101

The Pangolin, or Vasty 103

The Ice Fishers 107

Binge 108

Cow Moose, Route 125, Ripton, Vermont 112

Chipmunk 113

The Triumph 114

Salonica 140

The Banisters 143

The Sheet 144

Le Jongleur 146

An Item 149

Oscar Wilde at the Pavilion Hotel 151

Viral 153

A Bull 156

Plaguey Hill 163

Acknowledgments 179

Editorial Reviews

12/20/2021

Muldoon’s energetic 14th collection brims with the poet’s characteristic wit, employing a seemingly endless array of cultural references and allusions to illuminate the troubled present. In a long poem titled “American Standard” (a reference to the toilet brand), Muldoon recasts T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land into a commentary on America’s continuing moral and political backsliding: “Through fire and flood we rode towards Paradise/ where every disaster’s a natural disaster/ and every word a word of advice/ from the ringleted Buffalo Bill, our ringmaster.” In “Salonica,” a Mediterranean city becomes a symbol for how layers of contested history make it difficult to find common ground, when “in the Archaeological Museum there’s at least one artifact/ from a past we simply cannot reenact.” Muldoon comes close to a statement of intent in a poem referencing space junk: “It’s the artist’s job to collect detritus and guide it back towards earth’s atmosphere/ since it’s in that flash, the flash/ of reentry, that something may be made clear.” Whether appraising Brexit or the pandemic, Muldoon’s acerbic yet thoughtful poems demonstrate his ear for lyric and eye for detail. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Named a Best Book of the Year by Financial Times, Irish Times, and The Guardian (UK)

"[A] storm of slaps against piety, prudery, cruelty and greed . . . Like Eliot, Muldoon’s after big, apocalyptic vision; unlike Eliot, Muldoon is willing—no, compelled—to clown . . . Like many important poets before him, from John Milton to Tim Rice, Muldoon knows that sinners and villains are more interesting, maybe more human, than self-appointed good guys. Poems, for Muldoon, are occasions to plumb the language for a truth that’s abysmal: as in appalling, and as in deep.” —Daisy Fried, The New York Times Book Review

“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. How does he do it?” —Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's

"Howdie-Skelp . . . offers the kind of slap that great poetry from the likes of William Butler Yeats or Seamus Heaney can produce, the kind of poetry that can make a reader wince with delight." —Michael Pearson, The New York Journal of Books

“When considering a poet as protean as Muldoon, analogies fail . . . Muldoon's poetry remains unremittingly consequential.” —Booklist

From the Publisher