To Ireland, I (Clarendon Lectures in English Literature)

Paul Muldoon, one of the most important poets of his generation, has produced a firework display of scholarship, wit, and intrigue in this idiosyncratic wander through the alphabet of Irish literature. From Beckett and Bowen, through Joyce, MacNeice, Swift, and Yeats, To Ireland, I is a provocative re-reading of the major Irish authors, with a particular emphasis on the continuity of the tradition.

Literature & Fiction

MULDOON, Paul

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

Humor & Entertainment

This book asks a deceptively simple question: what are states actually doing when they do penance for past injustices? Why are these penitential gestures - especially the gesture of apology - becoming so ubiquitous and what implications do they carry for the way power is exercised? Drawing on the work of Schmitt, Foucault and Agamben, the book argues that there is more at stake in sovereign acts of repentance and redress than either the recognition of the victims or the legitimacy of the state. Driven, it suggests, by an interest in 'healing', such acts testify to a new biopolitical raison d'état in which the management of trauma emerges as a critical expression of attempts to regulate the life of the population. The Penitent State seeks to show that the key issue created by the 'age of apology' is not whether sovereign acts of repentance and redress are sincere or insincere, but whether the political measures licensed in the name of healing deserve to be regarded as either restorative or just.

The Penitent State: Exposure, Mourning and the Biopolitics of National Healing

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

In his inaugural lecture, Professor Muldoon examines in detail the first stanza of 'All Souls' Night' by W. B. Yeats, written in Oxford in 1920, and considers the extent to which it might be a free-standing construct. He concludes that the poem is not so much an 'Epilogue to A Vision', as Yeats describes it in his epigraph, but an epilogue to a series of poems by Yeats's near namesake, Keats, including his 'To Autumn', published one hundred years earlier in 1820.

The End of the Poem: All Souls' Night by W.B. Yeats : An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 2 November 1999

Oxford Univ. Pr.

Annals of Chile

"Yarrow," a long poem conjuring up the 1960s, is presented with a group of shorter poems including "The Birth," "Incantata," and an adaptation of an episode of Ovid's "Metamorphoses"

The Annals of Chile

Poetry

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Yet my eye is drawn once again, Almost against its wishes, To the figure in the shadows, Willowy, and clean-shaven, As if he simply wandered in Between mending that fuse And washing the breakfast dishes. --from "The Bearded Woman, by Ribera"
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 and recreating the business of poetry. The thirty-year effort of Muldoon's career thus far, is altogether like a fascinatingly mutable climate in which each freshening period brings---as his first collection was predictively titled---new weather.

Paul Muldoon Poems 1968 - 1998

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

In The End of the Poem, Paul Muldoon, "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War" (The Times Literary Supplement), presents engaging, rigorous, and insightful explorations of a diverse group of poems, from Yeats's "All Souls' Night" to Stevie Smith's "I Remember" to Fernando Pessoa's "Autopsychography." Here Muldoon reminds us that the word "poem" comes, via French, from the Latin and Greek: "a thing made or created." He asks: Can a poem ever be a freestanding, discrete structure, or must it always interface with the whole of its author's bibliography--and biography? Muldoon explores the boundlessness, the illimitability, created by influence, what Robert Frost meant when he insisted that "the way to read a poem in prose or verse is in the light of all the other poems ever written." And he writes of the boundaries or borders between writer and reader and the extent to which one determines the role of the other. At the end, Muldoon returns to the most fruitful, and fraught, aspect of the phrase "the end of the poem": the interpretation that centers on the "aim" or "function" of a poem, and the question of whether or not the end of the poem is the beginning of criticism. Irreverent, deeply learned, often funny, and always stimulating, The End of the Poem is a vigorous and accessible approach to looking at poetry anew.

The End of the Poem (Oxford Lectures)

Frolic and Detour: Poems

A new collection from the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet
Though Frolic and Detour is Paul Muldoon’s thirteenth collection, it shows all the energy and ambition we might generally associate with a first book. Here, the poet brings his characteristic humor and humanity to the chickadee, the house wren, the deaths of Leonard Cohen and C. K. Williams, the Irish Rising, the Great War, and how “a streak of ragwort / may yet shine / as an off-the-record / remark becomes the party line.” Frolic and Detour reminds us that the sidelong glance is the sweetest, the tangential approach the most telling, and shows us why Paul Muldoon was described by Nick Laird, writing in The New York Review of Books, as “the most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets, [who] writes poems like no one else.”

Horse Latitudes: Poems

The title of Horse Latitudes, Paul Muldoon's tenth collection of poetry, refers to those areas thirty degrees north and south of the equator where sailing ships tend to be becalmed, where stasis (if not stagnation) is the order of the day. From Bosworth Field to Beijing, the Boyne to Bull Run, from a series of text messages to the nineteenth-century Irish poet Tom Moore to an elegy for Warren Zevon, and from post-Agreement Ireland to George W. Bush's America, this book presents us with fields of battle and fields of debate, in which we often seem to have come to a standstill, but in which language that has been debased may yet be restruck and made current to our predicament. Horse Latitudes is a triumphant new collection by one of the most esteemed poets of our time.

Of Plan B, an interim volume that included several of the poems in Maggot, Robert McCrum recently said in the London Observer that "Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet's task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection." In his eleventh full-length book, Muldoon reminds us that he is a traditional poet who is steadfastly at odds with tradition. If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn't your father's poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W. B. Yeats's remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are "sex and the dead," Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It's no accident that the centerpiece of Maggot is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its subject the urge to memorialize the scenes of fatal automobile accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title sequence but also many of the round songs that characterize Maggot, and has led Angela Leighton, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, to see these new poems as giving readers "a thrilling, wild, fairground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish."

Maggot: Poems

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Books by MULDOON, Paul

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MULDOON, Paul. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

To Ireland, I (Clarendon Lectures in English Literature)

To Ireland, I (Clarendon Lectures in English Literature)

The Penitent State: Exposure, Mourning and the Biopolitics of National Healing

The End of the Poem: All Souls' Night by W.B. Yeats : An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 2 November 1999

The Annals of Chile

Paul Muldoon Poems 1968 - 1998

The End of the Poem (Oxford Lectures)

Frolic and Detour: Poems

Horse Latitudes: Poems

Maggot: Poems