Reading Paul Muldoon

Reading Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon

The essays in this book testify to the fascination of Paul Muldoon’s poems, and also to their underlying contentiousness. The contributors see Muldoon from many different angles – biographical, formal, literary-historical, generic – but also direct attention to complex moments of creativity in which an extraordinary amount of originality is concentrated, and on the clarity of which a lot depends. In their different ways, all of the essays return to the question of what a poem can ‘tell’ us, whether about its author, about itself, or about the world in which it comes into being. The contributors, even in the degree to which they bring to light areas of disagreement about Muldoon’s strengths and weaknesses, continue a conversation about what poems (and poets) can tell us which Paul Muldoon’s work has made both compelling and fruitful.

The Poetry of Paul Muldoon

The Poetry of Paul Muldoon introduces the student and general reader to the critical discussion surrounding Muldoon’s oeuvre, as well as to his major themes. It examines the poet’s meditations on culture and nature, human and animal, speculations on the act of perception, figures fragmented by the Troubles, and philosophical considerations of colonisation. It then discusses what rank among the most beautiful and intricate elegies of our time. For Muldoon, art’s complicity in suffering is a political, self-indicting question, which his best poems endeavour to answer. If sometimes this Pulitzer Prize winner insists that art has a positive role to play, at other times he fears that it merely feeds off the carnage. This critical book shows how, for Muldoon, art should not merely repeat the devastation of the world - although he is afraid that it does, and engages in bitter moral despair that places his work among the very best any contemporary poet has written. The Poetry of Paul Muldoon unearths difficult questions of form with a metaphysical significance that is suitable to our times.