Poems 1968-1998

by Paul Muldoon

"Ireland"
The Volkswagen parked in the gap,
But gently ticking over.
You wonder if it's lovers
And not men hurrying back
Across two fields and a river.

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."

Genres: Poetry, Irish Literature, Literature

496 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Born in Northern Ireland, Muldoon currently resides in the US and teaches at Princeton University. He held the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1999 through 2004. In September 2007, Muldoon became the poetry editor of The New Yorker.

Awards:
1992: Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Madoc: A Mystery
1994: T. S. Eliot Prize for The Annals of Chile
1997: Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry for New Selected Poems 1968–1994
2002: T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) for Moy Sand and Gravel
2003: Griffin Poetry Prize (Canada) for Moy Sand and Gravel
2003: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Moy Sand and Gravel
2004: American Ireland Fund Literary Award
2004: Aspen Prize
2004: Shakespeare Prize

Reviews

[Daniel Klawitter · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were plenty of intriguing poems in this collection and I particularly liked his "Hopewell Haiku" sequences, as in these two examples:

A stone at its core,
this snowball's the porcelain
knob on winter's door.

On the road to town
a racoon in party mask.
Gray shawl. Gray ballgown.

Some of the poems I enjoyed most in this earlier sections of the book include "Keen," "Vaquero," "Tea," and several others, including the oft-mentioned "Wind and Tree." They are very well done and indeed, there are musical echoes in his early work of Seamus Heaney. But sweet baby Jesus...the entire section of "Madoc: A Mystery" was a mind-numbing yawn-inducer. Muldoon obviously has all the literary skills and tools he needs to write good if not great poems, which ends up making a lot of his work rather unfulfilling for me because he seems to not want to use those skills consistently.

He writes lines like: "However, I might allegorize some oscaraboscarabinary bevy". He is a smarty pants certainly, with apparently sometimes impenetrable intellectual ambitions for his poems, but I do not find him a consistently enjoyable or rewarding poet when he is exercising that part of himself on the page. As Dwight Garner stated in the New York Times: "His work only rarely trips off the tongue." That being said, I certainly don't mind "difficulty" in my poets. But Muldoon does not quite often enough (for me at least) pull off the feat of making the difficult poem also enjoyable and worthwhile, in contrast to, say, Geoffrey Hill.

[Christopher Flynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muldoon is my new favorite poet. He manages to combine self examination (maybe) with an utterly unsentimental mastery of language, sounds and multiple meanings. It's almost as if his poetry is saying that if it felt like it it could be L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, if it wanted to it could be political polemic, if it needed to it could be formalist, if absolutely pushed it could be autobiographical, it allows narrative to lurk without ever really letting it out of its closet. It's a poetry that belongs to no school, is no doubt unschoolable, just utterly brilliant.

And I usually don't rave, really.

[Sam Mauro · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ahahahahahahahh fuck no

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paul Muldoon has written some poems I love, many poems I like, and a lot more poems that just leave me cold. Yes, I appreciate his ear--both for the musicality of the work and his capacity to capture the voices of people; yes, too, I appreciate his mind: the way he talks about poetry, his sense of poetics, is terrific and interesting. Lastly, I appreciate his formal invention. But his work can also be self indulgent (do we really 90 haiku working with lines 1 and 3 rhyme, many of which don't add anything to the sequence) and his subjects banal, with the poems sometimes skipping along the surface of an incident rather than going deep. Give me a selected Muldoon over this collected any day.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Puzzles aren’t poems.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prolly a 3.5 for me, but poetry gets the bump. The long poems are pretty incredible and I'd like to return to them.

[Philip Coulter · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved one or two of the long ones - Incantata, for sure, and maybe Immram.

A lot of the rest of this, isn't for me.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

I usually have to force myself to read poetry. I don't know if I've ever enjoyed a book of (other than epic) poetry as much as this one. Muldoon's poems are funny, his references are fascinating to figure out, and he draws upon everything from Shakespeare to Talking Heads.

[Bonnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this when I was getting my degree in English literature. The class was called 'Death and Otherness,' and featured the poems of Muldoon, and 2 books by Coetzee. (The professor just happened to know both of them during her time teaching at Columbia University. Otherwise, the connection between Muldoon and Coetzee is a tenuous one at best.) It's easy for me to say I liked the Muldoon part of the class better than the Coetzee part, since I *loathed* Waiting for the Barbarians.

Anyway, Muldoon's poems have a dreamy, many layered quality that make them ripe for disecting. There are always multiple interpretations--although when your professor is constantly saying, "no. I was there when he wrote that one, and it meant..." it kind of takes the fun out of it. He's Irish, and, when reading the poems aloud, you fall into the cadence and it starts to *sound* Irish. I was always amazed by that. Also, if you like Yeats, you'll probably like Muldoon, since he's very much a modernized Yeats in style.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of my favorite poets, his first book New Weather is so raw and while still trying to protect himself, beautiful ties to nature and Ireland, a beautiful writer

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone should read Wind and Tree at least twenty times in their life.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

No matter how many times I pick up this volume of poems, I always find something that I never had found before. Muldoon is rigorous in his devotion to poem writing.

[Caroline-manring · Rating 4 out of 5]

He encounters the matter of the poem absolutely intrepidly, with a gusto that deepens, mythologizes & collectivizes a personal (hi)story while tickling most of what it chooses to touch.

[Bill]

4

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Wind and Tree. I also do not love many of his poems.