Howdie-Skelp

by Paul Muldoon

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet delivers a sharp wake-up call with his fourteenth collection.

A “howdie-skelp” is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It’s a wake-up call. A call to action.

The poems in Howdie-Skelp , Paul Muldoon’s new collection, include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land , an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a heroic crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an “affront” to good taste. Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture but to command our attention.

Genres: Poetry

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2021

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

[Callum MH · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m anxious to leave the first review for this book of poetry on here in case it influences people to not pick it up. I don’t particularly think I was the right audience for this, despite studying poetry at degree level, and I purely bought it because the front cover and title made me laugh.

While I can appreciate some beautiful and funny lines, as well as Muldoon’s adroit use of poetic form (particularly concatenation and leitmotif, anaphora, some pantoum/villanelle-esque moments and sonnets that address the structural strictures of our pandemic zeitgeist), I found the poems themselves to be a bit too referential, sometimes too autobiographical, for stupid, young me as the specifics and allusions would often go over my head. For example, Muldoon writes an ekphrastic, experimental series of poems that base themselves upon, yet irreverently and bawdily depart from, works of art I wasn’t completely familiar with so the success of each for me was dependent on extent to which I could piece together the references throughout. Occasionally, Muldoon will descend into name-dropping lists which befit his fragmentary poesis and the incongruity of his allusions well but didn’t do much for me - such instances happen in his overall interesting reimagining of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in the context of Trump’s presidency. Like The Waste Land, however, you would need footnotes or a commentary to better understand what’s going on and what brilliant things Muldoon is doing.

I’m sure a more educated, perhaps older audience, well-versed in Irish history and culture and the complexities of American politics, would find more to appreciate in this collection where a lot of the time I could “connect nothing with / Nothing”.

[David Cutler · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a friend's choice for our book club after he heard Paul Muldoon do a reading from it. I was interested to hear when we gathered that even said friend couldn't understand it. I think I can guess that it is very good writing and there is musicality and clever references but I could barely comprehend any of it other than some extremely short poems.

I see that afficianados have been comparing it to The Four Quartets and The Wasteland, but in the case of Elliott there is copious commentaries to appeal to but here we just need to have Paul Muldoon at our side explaining it and he isn't there.

It made me think of the difference between this and any volume by his great friend Seamus Heaney, who never abandons you in this way.

A mystery, and not in a good way.

[Bandit · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the stranger modern poetry collections I’ve read recently. The poet is as Irish as his name, but also has lived and taught in US for decades, so he mostly talks about his adopted country, taking on politics and social mores.
The interesting thing here is the manic energy of it all, the way the poet hops from subject to subject (often rhyming – woohoo – not many do these days) from observations to trivia and back. The rhythm (mostly because of the rhyme) is definitely there, you can hear these poems in your mind, like some mad manic raps. Kinda fun, didn’t quite wow, but entertained from time to time.
I did enjoy all the popculture and trivia references and the rhyming, so there’s that. And it went by quickly enough too.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Larded with vacuous cliches, meaningless repetition, nonsensical associations, gratuitous lewdness, and pretentious windbaggery, this collection reads like transcriptions of scribblings on cocktail napkins penned while the poet drank himself under the table.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an advanced copy of this new poetry collection.

According to the publisher's copy that came with this book, the title of this new collection Howdie-Skelp is a slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. A slap is a great way of describing the effects of reading this new assemblage of works by award-winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon.

The poems in this book run from cows in Vermont, classic poems in a translated form, as rich and as earthy as ever, a remake of The Waste Land and a few sonnets on COVID-19. All show a style and uniqueness that make each one different be it humourous, thoughtful or pessimistic

Muldoon uses pop culture alot, movie titles appear and plots are told and shared. Classic literature of course pop up, but also popular music. One poem The Pangolin, or Vasty, for Paul Simon, mixes song titles and lyrics throughout the work, which I'm not sure I enjoyed, but I still found intriguing.

Some of the poems are beautiful, some go on for awhile, and I'm not sure where I was left behind. Some like the following snippet 'We drank absinthe with sugar cubes till the road of excess ran alongside an eight-lane Möbius strip.', say more about me then should be told. Since I have read it I can't seem to escape it in my head.
A more than solid collection from a very powerful poet. Quite a few of the pieces stay with you, making you think when all want is not to.

[Andrew Pitkin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Muldoon's work is quite interesting. I got this collection because it has a purported "retelling" of T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land'.

The actual "retelling" is called "American Standard," and it's more so a refracted revisioning of the poem by Eliot that assesses its intellectual-cultural impact, as well as American culture of today. That said, it's not a true "retelling" rather than Muldoon's own take on the poem refracted in the cultural landscape of Modern US culture and politics. It's a 15-section poem that cursorily tackles different themes of similarity in English literature and culture as the 'Waste Land', but in a way that's quite different. Interesting, but not so brilliant.

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

a wonderful & imaginative collection! Muldoon is an expert at form and structure. i was often amazed by his ability to play with formal structure. these poems are full of history and humor which i consider a hard feat that few really nail. my favorite poem was "Salonica" which is the perfect example of formal structure blended with humor & history (and the tragedy that accompanies it). 4.5 stars

thanks to netgalley for the arc

[Differengenera · Rating 1 out of 5]

surreal jingly-jangly maximalist poems about food, puns, irreverent collapsing of high and low, e.g. Virgil appearing in a poem laden with popular culture + references to 'Drumpf', well, pretty well the opposite of what I look for in literature

[Simon Pitfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clever, even dazzling occasionally, but it doesn't speak to me right now in the way his early poems did forty years ago.

[Peter B Waddell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paul Muldoon luxuriates in word play with spelling, prounciation, meaning and association placed and primed to resonate playfully. The longer poems can frustrate as they dare the reader to crave context and biography, but as always, deliver rich rewards in language, wit, integrity of repetition, echo and suggestion across heritage and cultures personal, deep, shared. Like a wren glimpsed in a tangle of blackthorn, there is pleasure in the complex, the cryptic and the familiar. Thanks PM.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't get these poems. They feel like inside jokes. I get the sexual references, and there are loads of them, but they're all so maddeningly, groaningly, corny. One might think that a book filled with dirty double entendres would be fun to read. It isn't.