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| NEWS |
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| THE NEW YORKER |
| Paul Muldoon has been appointed poetry editor of the New Yorker. |
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| TARA OF THE KINGS |
| Paul Muldoon writes in the New York Times about the desecration of Tara of the Kings. Join the Campaign to Save Tara. |
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| HORSE LATITUDES |
| Horse Latitudes was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux and Faber and Faber in October 2006. |
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| Paul Muldoon is a force of nature. (Gerard Fanning, The Irish Times) |
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| Horse Latitudes sets the standards for poetry. (Chris Preddle, Poetry Ireland Review) |
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| The most politically expressive and far-reaching and, I would argue, successful of Muldoon's collections to date. (Guinn Batten, Irish Literary Supplement) |
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| Horse Latitudes is my favorite Muldoon volume in years. (David Mason, The Hudson Review) |
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| With Muldoon's most recent outings, from Horse Latitudes through the Oxford lectures to General Admission, the Irish poet proves that the middle stretch need not be bad for all poets as he continues to outrun all his contemporaries, never to be reined in. (Maria Johnston, Contemporary Poetry Review) |
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| Muldoon's tenth book of poetry is the work of a master and marks him as one of the most interesting and important poets writing in English today. (Lilah Hegnauer, The Virginia Quarterly Review) |
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| Horse Latitudes will extend and augment Muldoon's reputation as a master of the quantum leap of linguistic intelligence. But beyond the insistence on playfulness here is an equal counterweight of elegy, anger, love, conflict and doubt. (Ken Babstock, The Toronto Globe and Mail) |
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| No poet is as wicked, as stylish or as fun. (Richard Sanger, Toronto Star) |
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| Muldoon's wit and wordplay can be seen as that, a mask. Is he really serious? Yes indeed, but readers will keep asking the question, as they still do of Jonathan Swift and James Joyce. (Langdon Hammer, New York Times Book Review) |
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| Horse Latitudes is, as we would expect, a brilliant performance; it also offers us an unusually direct insight into some of the passions with which this supposedly detached and manipulative poet burns. (Fran Brearton, Tower Poetry) |
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| Muldoon, whose penchant for weird rhymes, startling juxtapositions and occasional mystification is on full display here, is widely regarded as "difficult", even perverse. Yet Horse Latitudes is the volume I would give to introduce someone to his work. (Gregory Feeley, Philadelphia Inquirer) |
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| When Muldoon is at his best he is one of the most exhilarating of all living poets. (Brian Phillips, Poetry) |
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| This is Muldoon's tenth collection of poems and, as usual, an event. (James Fenton, The Guardian) |
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| Paul Muldoon's Horse Latitudes contains some of his best work, including a wonderful long poem, 'The Old Country', in which every Irish cliché ever heard is both sent up and made magical. (Colm Toibin, Observer Books of the Year) |
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| The most haunting poetry I read this year was in Horse Latitudes, where Paul Muldoon is as often elegiac as playful, but in either mood an artist of consummate judgement. (Roy Foster, TLS Books of the Year) |
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| If Muldoon's lesser poems, when not incomprehensible, come off as mere games, his great ones are great games, matches between the absolutely necessary and the entirely arbitrary, played on the whole field of the English language, with grace, roughness, passion, late substitutions, astonishing transitions, and breathtaking saves. (Stephen Burt, TLS) |
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| A great poet. (James Longenbach, Slate) |
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| The range and ambition of Muldoon's poetry are as impressive as its idiosyncrasy. It encompasses epic, lyric, short story and intimately interlocked sequences such as the 19 sonnets forming the title sequence here. He has helped more than one generation think afresh about the dramatic possibilities of poetry and, perhaps most significantly, about the role of rhyme as an incitement to meaning. (Sean O'Brien, Sunday Times of London) |
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| Muldoon's far-fetched, elaborate metaphors in many ways resemble Metaphysical conceits in their yoking together of imagery through a virtuoso display of his wit. Ben Jonson once declared that Donne, "for not keeping of an accent, deserved hanging": What kind of death, one wonders, would he have asked the executioner to devise for Muldoon's serial crimes against the conventions of poetry? (Mark Ford, The New York Review of Books ) |
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| Age has deepened Muldoon's poetry, and in Horse Latitudes he has been able, in his finely maintained tightrope act, to bear aloft both grief and playfulness. (Helen Vendler, The New Republic) |
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| "Brilliantly playful poems." (Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun) |
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| The title sequence, which unifies emotion and language in a perfectly tuned harmony, may be the finest sonnet sequence published since Rainer Maria Rilke's "Orpheus" sonnets in 1922. (Jamie James, Los Angeles Times Book Review) |
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| The breathtaking pleasures of Muldoon's enigmatic verses--his absolute control of pitch and tone, his slinky rhythms and winking jests--are only the alluring surfaces beneath which all sorts of deeper and darker matter slowly becomes apparent. (Robert Potts, The Telegraph) |
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| Such poems don't just say things. We read them for what they do with and to language, how they engage and transform clichés, how they subvert genres not in a mere spirit of play, but to make them serviceable in new ways. (Michael Schmidt, The Scotsman) |
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| Muldoon is undisputedly a master poet. Many of his poems distinctly take up the poetic tradition yet skew it with half-rhymes and unlikely subjects for classical forms, and also engage deeply with the troubled politics of his native Northern Ireland yet intertwine them with Muldoon's own personal history, mythology and esoteric symbolism. If these poems are reluctant to offer themselves to easy interpretation, they nonetheless seduce the reader into repeated readings in which they only grow more interesting, a sure sign of their capacity to last. In his 11th collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winner and former professor of poetry at Oxford (his Oxford lectures are being released concurrently) is as good as ever. Amid the usual parade of poetic forms (a riddle, haiku and pantoum, among others), he treats post-9/11 America ("those weremy Twin Towers, right-"); aging, fatherhood and mortality ("a country toward which I've been rowing/ for fifty years"); the notion of "the old country" in a tour-de-force crown of sonnets ("Every escape was a narrow escape/ where every stroke was a broad stroke/ of an ax on a pig nape./ Every pig was a pig in a poke"); and the deaths of his sister and rocker Warren Zevon. With signature wit, Muldoon is preoccupied with the passage of time, the ways things change and stay the same, the distance between one culture and another, as well as the narrowing gap between high and popular culture. (Publishers Weekly) |
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| Muldoon is a poet's poet, a master technician whose latest volume demonstrates an ease with sonnets, sestinas and satire. Drawing equally on both popular and classic culture for inspiration, the work in this collection reaffirms his range and brilliance, while making a forceful argument for poetry's continued urgency and relevance. (Favorite Fiction and Poetry of 2006, Los Angeles Times) |
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| Muldoon has reinvented the possibilities of the relationship between poetic meaning and poetic form. There is little else to do but wonder and praise. (Deryn Rees-Jones, The Independent) |
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| Brilliant. (Christina Patterson, Independent Books of the Year) |
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| An exceptional collection. (Daily Telegraph Books of the Year) |
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| One of the most exhilarating of all living poets. (Brian Phillips, New York Sun) |
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| The final poem, "Sillyhow Stride"--written in memory of another kind of balladeer, Warren Zevon--is another of Muldoon's truly great, large-scaled, reeling elegies, freighted with grief for the world which goes beyond its ostensible subject. (Joyelle McSweeney, Rain Taxi) |
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| POETRY BOOK SOCIETY |
| Horse Latitudes is the Autumn 2006 Choice of the Poetry Book Society. |
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| Some poets set the bar for a generation; others either attempt to reset it, or content themselves with merely attempting to meet it. Still others try to forget all about such things, drinking at an altogether different kind of bar. Paul Muldoon could be forgiven for forgetting just how often he has set the bar, and should be congratulated for evading the role of a poet's poet, instead giving pleasure to his many readers, well beyond such markers. (Selectors' Comment) |
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| THE END OF THE POEM |
| Paul Muldoon's Oxford Lectures in Poetry was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Faber and Faber in October 2006. |
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| Masterful. (Sally Vickers, Observer Books of the Year 2007) |
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| A high-wire performance which generates great fun and insight... Any poet who can publish three volumes such as these (The End of the Poem, General Admission, Horse Latitudes) within a few months witnesses to a triumph of the creative imagination over all theories. The lectures are glorious, the songs are great fun, many of the individual poems are among the finest Muldoon has written. One is left eagerly awaiting to see what this great poet will do next. (William Bedford, Poetry Salzburg Review) |
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| He is throughout subtle, sly, seductive and instructive. And because his mind, like Auden's, is a supreme echo chamber of all that has been done in poetry, The End of the Poem is a great, amplifying book. (Barry Hill, The Australian) |
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| A rip-roaring work of inspired poetic scholarship and a stimulating, provocative, and unfailingly interesting read. (Maria Johnston, Contemporary Poetry Review) |
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| His essays strike the difficult balance between due complexity and readability. Even people who normally give literary criticism a wide berth could find a good deal of stimulus and pleasure in The End of the Poem. Let's hope some of them give it a try. (Sean O'Brien, Poetry Review) |
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| Muldoon dramatizes his experience of reading in such a way that he revives, admittedly speculatively and by means of his own circuits of association, the process by which the poem came into being. (Langdon Hammer, New York Times Book Review) |
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| Unlike many of his predecessors, Muldoon chooses not to generalize about poetry. Instead, he explicates individual poems, one per lecture. The procedure demands close attention, but the results are revelatory. Reading here is a collaborative recreation and, at their best, Muldoon's interpretations--sometimes whimsically tenuous, often breathtaking in their intellectual boldness--are like improvised, free associating poems. (Peter Conrad, Observer) |
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| Clear and deftly ironic, Muldoon's prose is a delight to read. (Rebecca Porte, Star Tribune) |
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| Gain a whole season of highbrow cred in one fell swoop by picking up Irish Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Muldoon's simultaneously released new collection of poetry, Horse Latitudes, and collection of essays, The End of the Poem. Reading either one you will look like the smartest person in the subway car. (New York Magazine) |
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| One of the most impressive books of practical criticism and poetic intelligence I have read in years. It is entertaining, informative, brilliant, distinctive, yet accessible for the common reader. (Maureen N. McLane, Chicago Tribune) |
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| Muldoon entertains almost as much as he enlightens, an unusual and refreshing approach. (The Economist) |
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| Necessary and irresistible. Muldoon's poems are of a piece with his prose, and when we follow him as he explores the writing of others we find new ways of reading his original work. (Michael Schmidt, Sunday Herald Books of the Year) |
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| His lectures, delivered with an intimate command of literary history and of individual texts, are nothing if not fascinating. (Sam Munson, The New York Sun) |
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| One of the most thrilling books of 'literary criticism' published in the last fifty years. (Adam Phillips, London Review of Books) |
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| Rackett |
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