New Selected Poems 1968-1994

by Paul Muldoon

Between New Weather (1973), which Seamus Heaney said marked its author as 'the most promising poet to appear in Ireland for years', and The Annals of Chile, which was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize for the best book of poems of 1994, Paul Muldoon amassed an incomparable body of work. New Selected Poems 1968-1994 offers the author's own choice from his first seven Faber collections, his pamphlets and his opera libretto Shining Brow, and serves as the ideal introduction for readers not yet familiar with his superabundant gifts. 'The most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War.' Times Literary Supplement

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published June 3, 2004

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

[Peter McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before this year [2024] I probably preferred Muldoon the sometime radio presenter to Muldoon the poet. (Muldoon the sometime radio presenter is still brilliant: look his name up on BBC Sounds.) But I undertook a project of systematically annotating the long elegy ‘Incantata’, with its ‘mirrored’ rhyming and repeated Beckett references. ‘Incantata’ is a brilliant, desperately sad poem, and it juggles emotions that most desperately sad poems from accomplished poets simply could not keep in the air: Muldoon lost a loved one as much to alternative medicine as to cancer. The project defeated in my mind once and for all the charge that there is ‘no there there’ behind Muldoon’s wordplay and references, and I’ve been enjoying him a lot more since.

[Peter Graarup Westergaard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great poems by a great poet. Worthy of the Nobel Prize. So full of sensitive imagery. Excellent descriptions of Muldoon's Ireland.