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Customer Reviews (4)

Joyce voice
Muldoon reads like Finnegans Wake: multilingual interlocking wordplay, principally puns, allusions and ironic twists on common expressions. The novel's conceit is philology, that language packs in itself the psychology and history of human beings, and that fictional characters, Ireland, and world history can be lined up just right by and with purling wordplay to challenge science, social or even physical, in its ability to discover truth.But what if you're post-modern even in the minimal sense that such a theory was an inflationary bubble that blew up in the last century and that puns, allusions and spun idioms can be used to document middle-class life, enhancing it like sugar eggs' elaborate confectionery adds to the eerie realism of the miniatures inside them?Or you might find crossword fun in figuring out obvious answers from clever clues, a bonus in storytelling like the physical beauty of movie stars in real-people roles.If you enjoy the Joycean for any of the reasons above, or in some fuzzy combination, you should try mulling over Muldoon for he's the best living practitioner of that distinctive art.

Modernist doggerel
Oh this is just too awful for words. Utterly tedious subject matter embalmed in hiply snide erudition [lazy obscurity with just enough reference points to thrill the trainspotters] and about as poetic as the drivel one has come to expect from an earnest Creative Writing Seminar student. Why has someone like Muldoon been elevated to his present position in the Pantheon of Contemporary Poets ... It can't be true, but yes it is ... Poetry Editor of the New Yorker. Dear oh dear. It's amateur-hour for post-modernist kiddies who've attended a hundred too many Writers' Festivals. Watch out Charlie Simic and Adam Zagajewski. My beloved New Yorker will be exiling you soon for being readable, using apposite metaphors, and actually having something to write about. Gee, come to think of it, even John Ashbery with his flippantly surrealistic collage might be too disagreeably poetic for the new door nazis. Paul Muldoon is a professional poet in all the worst senses.

Dylan and Zevon and Paul Muldoon
(sung to the tune of "I Shall Be Free No. 10")
I was thinkin' about Dylan and Paul Muldoon.
One writes poems; the other writes tunes.
One's an academic of the third degree;
The other's got an honorary Ph.D.
They've both been to Princeton and to Oxford Town;
They think about somethin' and they write it all down.
They both distill the essence in a coupla words
As subtle and compelling as diminished thirds.
I wish them both a shot at immortality;
I think that Warren Zevon would agree with me.

always glad to have more muldoon
I felt that this book exceeds Moy Sand and Grave in quality.It evokes some of the mystery of Muldoon's previous work.Many of his poems are densely inscrutable, yet somehow utterly compelling.One often gets the impression that he may be obliquely referencing things beyond what is immediately offered in the writing....but I am not much of a scholar: is there a skeleton key? ... Read more

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Here the reader can explore substantial selections of the poetry of ten of the most consistently impressive of the postwar poets - Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Durcan, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian. The editor, Paul Muldoon, is widely regarded as the leading Irish poet of his generation. In this anthology he brings together fellow poets who have maintained and extended Yeats's legacy. ... Read more

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RARE AND COLLECTIBLE BOOK. AVAILABLE ONLY for $65. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Pointed poetry!
This is not Muldoon's most accessible book, but it would be a shame to mistake the surface complexity for obscurity, or to assume that nothing worthwhile lurks beneath.In fact the book is deep, beautiful and profound-- and, of course, because it is Muldoon, funny as h-e-double-hockeysticks. "The Soap Pig" is as moving as anything Muldoon has written (atleast until "Incantata" in *The Annals of Chile*), and severalpoems, including "Something Else," "The Mist-Net," andthe excellent title poem are showcases for the poet's inimitable wit.Asfor those who have trouble locating the "point" of Muldoon'swork, they should check out the poem called "The Point" in hisnew collection, *Hay*.Like his other work, it may leave them scratchingtheir heads, but hey, if you've got an itch . . .

Pointless Poetry!
These poems are filled with obscene language and non-sensical usages of words. I read this for a school report, and was disgusted at Mulddoon's lack of talent. ... Read more

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The four pieces that make up this work are taken from Muldoon's Oxford Clarendon Lectures of 1998. Together, they take the form of an A-Z, or abecedary of Irish literature, in which his imagination forges links between disparate aspects and individuals in the Irish literary landscape, ranging back and forth between modern and medieval. From Beckett and Bowen, through MacNeice, Swift and Yeats - and guided throughout by Joyce - "To Ireland, I" moves lightly through the long grass of Irish writing. The result is a provocative handbook for the literary traveller, who is treated to an astonishing display of scholarship and idiosyncratic inwardness from Irish literature over the course of a millennium. ... Read more

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Great poets are not always great critics
I am bemused and rather disappointed with this book. Muldoon uses intertextual associativeness to generate wonderful poems -- touching, comic, and stylistically breath-taking. Here he uses the same method in acritical rhapsody that links together a galaxy of Irish literary texts andlegends, arranged (or disarranged) in alphabetical order. He moves freelyand funnily between Gaelic and English, ancient and modern, biographicaland textual. The performance is carried off with brio, in a manner thatrecalls certain experiments in randomness of Roland Barthes. Unfortunately,many of the allusions Muldoon finds are so farfetched as to make one winceas at a bad pun. He circles around Joyce's "The Dead," adding oneor two valid observations to what allusion-hunters have already noted, butotherwise sending readers off on a wild goose chase. Unlike Seamus Heaney,who is a great, authoritative, and highly trained literary critic, Muldoondoes not project from his distinctive poetic sensibility a capaciousliterary critical vision. He flogs to death the idea of"conglomewriting" as a distinctively Irish practice, culminatingin Finnegans Wake, but he offers little serious reflection on what theliterary value of this practice might be. For that one must turn to workslike Gerard Genette's Palimpsestes, which offers a careful and thoroughexamination of the ancient art of intertextual composition. Professorialpedants will find consolation in the thought that poets may need theirservices after all. ... Read more

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A poem in which the neurotic Narcissus Batt, Esq, is up late one night in his Gothic manor house, jotting down his night-thoughts, which take the form of various beasts who reveal themselves alphabetically. ... Read more

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This collection of poems is by the author of "Meeting the British", "Mules", "Shining Brow" and "The Annals of Chile". Muldoon has won the G. Faber Memorial Award twice. ... Read more