Selected Poems: 1968-1986

by Paul Muldoon

Poems deal with wind, the past, animals, war, parents, circuses, movies, myth, mushrooms, death, and arguements

Genres: Poetry

153 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1987

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

[Paula · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this more than I did, simply because I studied Irish literature as an undergraduate and enjoyed much of what I read. I found Muldoon to use too many allusions and references that I didn't understand or remember, though, which kept me from grasping at the real meaning or intention of many of the poems in this collection.

This actually is a quick summation of about two decades of work that Muldoon produced, taken from five different books that he published. The poems that I found most moving more often were those out of his book Meeting the British, including the poem that shares that title:


We met the British in the dead of winter.
The sky was lavender

and the snow lavender-blue.
I could hear, far below,

the sound of two streams coming together
(both were frozen over)

and, no less strange,
myself calling out in French

across that forest-
clearing. Neither General Jeffrey Amherst

nor Colonel Henry Bouquet
could stomach our willow-tobacco.

As for the unusual
scent when the Colonel shook out his hand-

kerchief: C'est la lavande,
une fleur mauve comme le ciel.

They gave us six fishhooks
and two blankets embroidered with smallpox.


The incessant need for rhyme, even when broken into half- and slant-rhyme, drove me crazy by the end of the book (even when used in good poems like the one above), mainly because it was either in couplets or quatrains. I might have appreciated this more had I read it while I was still an undergraduate, but I'm sure I would have had many of the same problems while reading it then as I did now.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite poetry books.

[Mills College Library]

821.914 M954s 1993