Poems 1968-1998

FROM OUR EDITORS

This comprehensive volume, spanning three decades, makes abundantly clear the unique genius of the poet who was described many years ago by Seamus Heaney as "the real thing." Muldoon's influences range from Keats, Yeats, and Joyce to Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, and Bob Dylan. The result is a poetry that is breathtaking and wholly original.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Sven Birkerts has said, "It is not usual for a poet of Muldoon's years to have . . . an oeuvre disclosing significant shifts and evolutions. But Muldoon, more than most, is an artist in high flight from self-repetition and the deadening business of living up to created expectations." The body of work in Poems 1968-1998--a comprehensive gathering of Paul Muldoon's eight volumes--finds a great poet reinventing himself at every turn. Muldoon's career thus far shows us a fascinatingly mutable climate in which each freshening period brings--as his first collection was predictively titled--new weather.

FROM THE CRITICS

Book Magazine

Once tutored by fellow Irishman Seamus Heaney, Muldoon writes poetry known for its dry humor, narrative scenes, deferred meanings and Joycean word games. Since 1983's Quoof, his muse has included the United States, and the tone of his verse has changed to accommodate this multiculturalism. Among his many talents, Muldoon has a penchant for long poems and poetry cycles, best displayed in "Middagh Street," "Madoc: A Mystery," the autobiographical "Yarrow" and "Sleeve Notes." "Madoc: A Mystery," which is the best of the lot, offers an amusing romp through American history and myth. It explores the mystery of Welsh Indians and features comic cameos by Thomas Jefferson and Lewis and Clark. These frantically paced scenes and dense images can be tough going, though they are always rewarding. Muldoon's signature Gaelic whimsy is thoroughly refreshing. —Stephen Whited

Publishers Weekly

The best, most-honored Irish poet of the generation after Heaney, "the man who could rhyme knife with fork" (as another poet quipped), Muldoon finds his collected work seeing print a few months before his 50th birthday not bad for a farmer's son from Armagh. Though it includes no new poems, this big brick of a volume does make available several long-out-of-print early books, and it serves better than Muldoon's older selecteds to reveal the full range of his prodigious talents. There is the Frostian, anecdotal Muldoon of early work like "The Big House": "I was only the girl under the stairs/ But I was the first to notice something was wrong." There is the evasive, tough-guy Muldoon who wrote narrative poems, like "The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants," about terror and gangsters in his native Ulster. There is the brilliantly canny and understatedly moving family elegist. There is the Muldoon whose oeuvre includes all shades of romantic and erotic emotion, from sexual disgust ("Aisling") to long-married tenderness ("Long Finish"). There is the writer of serious, terse, effective political verse, the author of 100 haiku about suburban New Jersey, and the Muldoon who recreated the sonnet in his own image. And, most famously, there is the postmodern comic, who claims to be "my own stunt double," and who explains in another recent poem: "A bird in the hand is better than no bread./ To have your cake is to pay Paul." Muldoon (who now teaches at Princeton and Oxford) may yet expand his range even further; for now, the Muldoons are all here, in force and in bulk. Most readers of poetry will need to deal with them. (Apr.) Forecast: The eight or so separate Muldoon volumes on the shelves had the effect of putting off first-time readers, and making a diverse body of work seem diffuse. This collection corrects both problems, and makes Muldoon's first half-century a one-shot buy for libraries and consumers alike. If reviewers take this chance to sum up the career, this book could put Muldoon in Heaney's neighborhood. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

After 30 years, Muldoon is still eager to be unpredictable, to be a bandit on the run from each previous incarnation or disguise. The first poem of his second collection ("Lunch with Pancho Villa") has the Mexican revolutionary look askance at Muldoon's first book of shattered pastorals and disaffected lyrics: "There's more to living in this country / Than stars and horses, pigs and trees, / Not that you'd guess it from your poems." The admonition is probably too harsh, but Villa here speaks as the author's poetic conscience, always urging him to write "Something a little nearer home." The need to get nearer to home has often involved grand efforts at re-writing, whether it be public history or the poet's own life. Muldoon's two most breathtaking poems to date, both included here, are the book-length "Madoc-A Mystery" and the long poem "Yarrow" (from The Annals of Chile). "Madoc" imagines that Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey have arrived in America during the French-and-Indian War, where they attempt to set up a "Pantisocractic" society. "Yarrow" is in part a hallucinatory memoir of the poet's bookish childhood, in which characters from Treasure Island, The Arabian Nights, and the Arthurian legends all meet and merge in a dreamy soup of story and poem. Muldoon's fanatic, Joycean dedication to language is what most impresses throughout; it seems as if he wants to alight at least once on every word in the lexicon. If this desire sometimes riddles his poems with occult references, it also produces a lot of astonishing music. The work of a great and restless poet unsatisfied with his own heights.