Selected Poems 1968-2014

by Paul Muldoon

Overview

“The most significant English-Language poet born since the second world war.” —The Times Literary Supplement

Selected 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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374537302
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	11/14/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(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 more than thirty years. He is the author of more than a dozen previous collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize; Selected Poems 1968–2014; and, Howdie-Skelp.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

It's a compact, powerful book, filled with catharses you didn't know you needed…[Muldoon's] work has always leaned on folklore, superstitions and old wives' tales. He makes these feel modern. He takes traditional verse forms—sonnets, sestinas, ballads, pantoums—and retools them, as if they were engine parts, for his own purposes as well…For most of Selected Poems 1968-2014 Mr. Muldoon is…close up, whispering in the reader's ear. What I always imagine he is saying is his own version of this line from the poet Rita Dove: "If you feel strange, strange things will happen to you."

The New York Times - Dwight Garner