Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon’s collection Howdie-Skelp came out in 2021.

Poem: ‘My Grandfather’s Wake’

Paul Muldoon, 7 February 1985

If the houses in Wyeth’s Christina’s World and Mallick’s Days of Heaven are triremes, yes, triremes riding the ‘sea of grain’, then each has a little barge in tow – a freshly-dug grave.

I was trying to remember, Nancy, how many New England graveyards you own, all silver birch and neat, white picket-fences.

If only that you might make room for a nine-banded...

Sweaney Peregraine

Paul Muldoon, 1 November 1984

The title-sequence of Seamus Heaney’s sixth collection finds him on Station Island, Lough Derg, more commonly known as St Patrick’s Purgatory. It’s the setting for a pilgrimage undertaken by thousands of Irish men and women each year. For three days they fast and pray, deprive themselves of sleep, and walk barefoot round the station ‘beds’ – circles of rough stones said to be the remains of monastic huts. A place, then, strongly associated in the Irish mind with self-denial, contemplation, spiritual renewal; a place, too, that has attracted writers like Sean O’Faolain, Denis Devlin, William Carleton and Patrick Kavanagh; a place where the individual might decently ruminate on his relationship with society.’

Two Poems

Paul Muldoon, 1 December 1983

The Brownlows

Were loyal and steadfast, like granite against the sea:

‘The only thing that ran in our family was the greyhound.’

The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife

I might as well be another guest at the wedding-feast of Strongbow and Aoife Mac Murrough as watch you, Mary,

try to get to grips with a spider-crab’s crossbow and cuirass. A creative pause before the second...

Poem: ‘from Last Poems’

Paul Muldoon, 19 February 1981

iv

Not that I care who’s sleeping with whom now she’s had her womb removed, now it lies in its own glar like the last beetroot in the pickle-jar.

v

I would have it, were I bold, without relish, my own lightly-broiled heart on the side.

xiii

I would be happy in the knowledge that as I laboured up the no-through-road towards your cottage you ran to meet me. Your long white shift,...

A Book of Evasions

Paul Muldoon, 20 March 1980

In his budget of 1969, Charles Haughey, then Minister of Finance, granted exemption from income tax to artists resident in the Republic of Ireland. In the past, Irish authors had been much given to exile: now, perhaps, they could afford to stay at home and exercise their proper talents for silence and cunning. That ‘standing army of ten thousand poets’ was then supplemented by a troop of foreign gallowglasses, all benefiting to a greater or lesser degree from this piece of ‘enlightened legislation’, some internationally best-selling soldiers-of-fortune to a very considerable degree indeed. Not since Lebor Gabala, or the Book of Invasions, that pseudo-historical account of the successive colonisations of Ireland from the flood to the coming of Christianity (including those of the Roman Cessair, Parthalan the Greek, the giant Fomorians, the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha De Dannan, the Gaels themselves under the command of the Spanish Soldier) – not since then had such a multinational company established a beachhead. This might be one of Mr Haughey’s more successful – and less contentious – import drives.

Someone Else: Paul Muldoon

Adam Phillips, 4 January 2007

Paul Muldoon excluded himself from Contemporary Irish Poetry, his 1986 Faber anthology, but he included a poem by Seamus Heaney that was dedicated to him. We don’t of course know why the...

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Everyone who reads Paul Muldoon will be dazzled by his linguistic exuberance. He follows the lead of Pope and Byron, engaging in many of the displays of wit that they engage in, particularly an...

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In the Gasworks

David Wheatley, 18 May 2000

Marcel Aymé’s novel Le Passemuraille, about a man who can walk through walls, would have interested Thomas Caulfield Irwin (1823-92). Irwin is cited in Paul Muldoon’s To...

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Little Do We Know

Mark Ford, 12 January 1995

‘What are we going to write about now?’ one of Ulster’s more engagé poets half-jokingly inquired soon after the IRA’s ceasefire was announced. One would imagine that...

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Upstaging

Paul Driver, 19 August 1993

Although W.H. Auden, who ranks with Hugo von Hofmannsthal among the master librettists of the age, thought that the meaning of libretto’s words were its least important component (at any...

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Muldoon – A Mystery

Michael Hofmann, 20 December 1990

Looked at in one way, Madoc – A Mystery is an extraordinary and unpredictable departure, a book of poems the size of many novels, with a title poem nigh on two hundred and fifty pages long,...

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Out of the blue

Mark Ford, 10 December 1987

So characteristic of Paul Muldoon’s poetry as to be almost a hallmark is the moment, unnerving and exciting in about equal measures, when his speaker is suddenly revealed to himself as...

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Douglas Dunn’s Selected Poems includes the greater part of his published poems, from Terry Street (published in 1969, and reissued with this selection) through four more volumes to the...

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Green Martyrs

Patricia Craig, 24 July 1986

Each of these books – two anthologies and a critical study – is notable for its exclusions, among other things; each takes a strong line over questions of definition and evaluation;...

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The New Narrative

John Kerrigan, 16 February 1984

‘When We talk of narrative poetry today,’ James Fenton asks in the September issue of Poetry Review, ‘are we referring to the kind of story in which, you want to know what...

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Long Goodbye

Derek Mahon, 20 November 1980

Why Brownlee left is Paul Muldoon’s third book of poems, and his most interesting so far. Whereas, in the earlier books, he didn’t do a great deal more than exercise the quirky,...

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