The Wind Dog

by Tom Paulin

An outstanding collection of poems by Tom Paulin, one of Britain's most original poets and literary critics

"o chitterin chatterin platinum licht
the bow shall be in the clouds
and I will look upon it
to remember the everlasting testament
between God and all that liveth upon earth
whatsoever flesh or faith it be
--they may have turned Tyndale into tinder
but the bow he wrought lives high
in this wet blue sky"
--from "The Wind Dog"

In the north of Ireland, a "wind dog" is a fragment of a rainbow, and in the title poem of this collection, it provides Tom Paulin with a perfect bridge into childhood and its "lingo-jingo of beginnings." The poem is a singing meditation on the life of the ear--"the only true reader"--and the meaning and music of both words and preverbal sounds are a recurring theme in this rich, cogent, and adventurous volume.

96 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2000

About the author

Tom (Thomas Neilson) Paulin is a poet, critic and playwright. He was raised in Belfast in Northern Ireland where his father was the headmaster of a grammar school, and his mother was a doctor. He was educated at Hull University and Lincoln College, Oxford.

He lectured in English at the University of Nottingham from 1972 until 1989, and was Reader in Poetry from 1989 until 1994. He was a director of Field Day Theatre Company in Derry, Northern Ireland. He has also taught at the University of Virginia and was Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Reading. He is now G. M. Young Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. He is a well-known broadcaster and a regular member of the panel for the BBC Television arts programme 'Newsnight Review'.

Much of his early poetry reflects the political situation in Northern Ireland and the sectarian violence which has beset the province since the late 1960s. His collections include A State of Justice (1977), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; The Strange Museum (1980), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Liberty Tree (1983) and the acclaimed Fivemiletown (1987), which explores Northern Irish Protestant culture and identities. Later collections include Walking a Line (1994) and The Wind Dog (1999), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Invasion Handbook (2002) is the first instalment of an epic poem about the Second World War. His latest collection is The Road to Inver: Translations, Versions and Imitations 1975-2003 (2004), which brings together work from four decades.

His non-fiction includes Ireland and the English Crisis (1984), Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (1992), The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style (1998), a critical study of the nineteenth-century essayist and radical, and (with Amit Chaudhuri), D. H. Lawrence and "Difference": The Poetry of the Present (2003), a study exploring Lawrence's position as a 'foreigner' in the English canon.

Tom Paulin is editor of The Faber Book of Political Verse (1986) and The Faber Book of Vernacular Poetry (1990). His plays include The Riot Act: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone, which toured Ireland in 1984, and All the Way to the Empire Room which was broadcast by the BBC in 1994. His latest book is The Secret Life of Poems (2007).

Tom Paulin lives in Oxford with his wife and two sons.