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Customer Reviews (1)

By Jove, he's done it again!
Warning!If you have not yet read Maggot, this review will make absolutely no sense to you. Nevertheless, if you are crazy enough to press on and read it anyway and it piques your curiosity (or even if it doesn't), I encourage you to buy the book.You won't regret it.

Up a Latvian creek
with a gaggle of Greek
mythological freaks
in a rampaging Gaul's worthy saga,

you'll find Wilbur and Ed
with the dolphin that sped
past the Penguin of Dread
and the freaks and the geeks going gaga.

It's got death on a quag, it's
got rusk in a bag, it's
got flesh-eating maggots
that feast on our eyes.

Down an Antrim back road
with a frog (not a toad)
in full sap-bilking mode
as he thickens the milk in your bucket,

you'll find Sammy and Chuck;
ever down on their luck,
lacking ducat or buck,
they say, "Morons they are so just f___ it."

It's got spirits that flag, it's
got pork as a gag, it's
got gift-bearing maggots
with stars in their eyes.

On a green, grassy knoll
with a mob of French trolls
as the motorcade rolls
into history that's already written,

you'll find Pliny and Franc;
one confused and one blank,
both with no rope to yank,
they say, "Twice shy upstages once bitten."

It's got porcupine slag, it's
got pus (what a drag!), it's
got cheer-leading maggots
that suck out our I's.

For want of a mayfly
the universe was lost.

... Read more

Product Description
Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening, as gritty as they are graceful, these poems seem capable of taking in almost anything, and anybody, be it a Tuareg glimpsed on the Irish border, Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth I, a hunted hare, William Tell, William Butler Yeats, Sitting Bull, Ted Hughes, an otter, a fox, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Joscelyne, un unearthed pit pony, a loaf of bread, an outhouse, a killdeer, Oscar Wilde, or a flock of redknots. At the heart of the book is an elegy for a miscarried child, and that elegiac tone predominates, particularly in the elegant remaking of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" with which the book concludes, where a welter of traffic signs and slogans, along with the spirits of admen, hardware storekeepers, flimflammers, fixers, and other forebears, are borne along by a hurricane-swollen canal, and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matter of our age.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Obscure
Poetry is an art form that succeeds only if the reader can share with the poet a vision communicated by the poem.How this work won a pulitzer prize escapes me.The only way for an "outsider" the read this book is with an interpreter and a dictionary so the obscure, at least from my point of view, references can be appreciated.As a reader I get no sense of the images the writer wants to conjure and the poems fail to take me anywhere but to the cliff of reason where I am just left without a bridge for crossing.I do not wonder I was able to purchase this book for such a low price.

Solid collection best read after his previous three volumes
My rating does not mean this is average poetic work, only that by comparison to his last three collections, it less frequently reaches their daunting and rarified heights. It's actually a better place to start reading the "later" Muldoon, in fact. Domesticity has tamed a bit of the bravura evident in the arcane lore dazzling the other collections perhaps too much. Poems here like "Unapproved Road," mixing Taureg with IRA in its 1950s failed "border campaign," wittily contrast in a way that Muldoon warms to more and more as his work confronts his own hyphenating midlife identity into an American as much as an Irish poet. "Guns & Butter," "Whitethorns," "A Brief Course on Decommissioning" address the post-1998 events in the North of Ireland intelligently and without pandering. His children and wife now enter his work to round it out more vividly, and at least some of the shorter poems here continue the clarity sought in "Hay"'s briefer verses.

The reason this collection loses a star is the last poem, as usual in his work a longer one: "At the Sign of the Black Horse." The Irish navvy-Jewish mogul undercurrent never convinces, but seems layered over the parental concerns. Where Muldoon often swerves to avoid obstacles, here he seems to plow ahead, but ends up floundering a bit when taking more time to expand and concentrate his direction would've made for a better poetic quest into a very deserving subject of culture clash.

Good Stuff
Here's a Muldoon pastiche:

Basement

Then to spy
in an unused cellar spot

Under a bulb fixture
long since jury-rigged
in deal cast-off

And between oil tank
and salt-scalloped stone wall

--Between a ruck
and a carapace--

A tiny skeleton--mouse.

My instinct:
to trip-tipsy the dark

--As even the Dean
and Cuchulain might--

fantastic.

[My opinion is that Muldoon peaked in 1990 with his tour de force, MADOC--A Mystery, the book-length poem and astounding work of the imagination.MADOC was large, confounding, mysterious, lyrical, and sui generis (really).Yet many readers/reviewers did not appreciate it.Since that work, Muldoon seemingly has tried to obtain such appreciation by offering more manageable fare--featuring topical themes, easy wit, sentiment, form, and rhyme (not to mention all those pretty names of Irish places).He has served up plates of warm apercus.If that is your thing--fine.He is terribly accomplished--his more recent poems, including those of Moy Sand and Gravel, sparkle with polish and panache.But I will take the polar edge of the creative MADOC thankyouverymuch.] ... Read more

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"Ireland"
The Volkswagen parked in the gap,
But gently ticking over.
You wonder if it's lovers
And not men hurrying back
Across two fields and a river.

Sven Birkerts has said, "It is not usual for a poet of Muldoon's years to have . . . an oeuvre disclosing significant shifts and evolutions. But Muldoon, more than most, is an artist in high flight from self-repetition and the deadening business of living up to created expectations." The body of work in Poems 1968-1998 -- a comprehensive gathering of Paul Muldoon's eight volumes -- finds a great poet reinventing himself at every turn. Muldoon's career thus far shows us a fascinatingly mutable climate in which each freshening period brings -- as his first collection was predictively titled -- new weather."
... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

I love Paul Muldoon...
...I really do. The common criticism of Muldoon is that his constant use of mythical/literary allusion and Irish colloquial vocabulary makes him very difficult (if not impossible) to understand. I would argue, however, that this is Muldoon's point, especially in regards to his many elegies. Muldoon himself cannot access and express the depth of his mourning, and the diffult language he exposes the reader to assures that his feeling of insufficiency is not lost on anyone else. In my view, this is a brilliant and beautiful approach to modern elegy.

All of that being said, it is impossible not to get lost in Muldoon's beautiful language and rhythm. Reading even one verse of a Muldoon poem can keep me going for a whole day. Don't read him if you're afraid of doing a little thinking, but keep in mind that not all of his allusions are meant to be understood. Just enjoy.

half-rating for a half-great book
If you happen to find this book torn in half in a used book shop, then buy only the first half.There you will find brilliant Muldoon.If you reaqd just that, you'll think he's the greatest Irish poet ever (or at least among the top three).I wish I could say the same for the last half.

Glibly Great~Greatly Glib
If glibness can be elevated to greatness, then (as critics like to say), Muldoon has no peer. But that's a big "if". I picked up this volume based on a recent New York Times article where I read that (just in case you haven't heard yet) he is a Professor of Poetry at both Oxford and Princeton, having been inducted into the former at the tender age of 20. Surely, dear reader, you must know by now the unparalleled list of professorial poets produced by Oxford & Princeton? Need I name names?

I nevertheless like Pual Muldoon's poetry. I recommend it and it's fun to read, but his book of poems from 1968-1998 couldhardly be considered a string of pearls.

What you will and won't get.

His is like snapshot poetry. Don't expect extended metaphor, conceits, or any overall development in the way of imagery or narrative. His is a quick wit and quick eye. Reading his poem is like setting fire to a box of matches. There's no smoldering pathos hear. His fire leaps from matchtip to matchtip, word to word, until the whole of it goes up in an exciting little burst of flames.

His poetry has been compared to Donne, but similarities are thin. For example, Donne was singularly known for the difficulty of his metrical writing. Expect no metrical daring from Muldoon. He doesn't write by numbers. Muldoon's difficulty can be summed up, I think, by this tidy comparison. Reading Muldoon is like listening to someone else's phone conversation. You will only ever hear half the conversation.

The earlier books in this collected poems are the most accessible and, in certain ways, the more enjoyable. You'll find those matchtip lines like: "Once you swallowed a radar-blip/of peyote/you were out of your tree..." This makes for fun reading.

The book "Madoc: A Mystery", however, dating from 1990 indulges in a stellar example of poetic onanism. Clearly, the writing of Madoc brought great pleasure to the author, but I personally doubt this book will mean much to anyone not having a fetish for erudite cleverness. Clearly, the Princetion professor Muldoon is having a long distance conversation with his Oxford counterpart. You will have to wiretap if you really want to get this stuff. For example:

"[Galen]
"It transpires that Bucephalus is even now
"pumping jet
"of spunk into the rowdy-dow-dow
"of some hoity-toity little skewbald jade."

Get it? If you do, this bud is for you.

The final book "Hay", is the best of them. Even if a portion of the poems strike one as little more than deliciously worded doggerel, the fun of Muldoon's wit evens the whole of it out. "I've upset the pail/in which my daughter had kept/her five-`No, six'-snails." Substitute "reader" for "daughter" and you get the idea.

By the way, did you know he was professor of poetry at Princeton AND Oxford???

A Poet of the First Order
I first encountered Paul Muldoon when he came to my university to give a reading and a seminar talk. When I picked up a photocopied packet of his poems and started to read through them, I was confused, then intrigued, then thrilled. When Muldoon arrived a few days later for the poetry reading and the seminar discussion, I was further impressed by this wonderful man, who has a deep understanding of poetry and language.

These poems are not "easy". Many of them require multiple readings to begin to understand them (although some are quite straightforward, but these are rare). However, Muldoon's use of language, his sense for sounds, his near-obsession with rhyme, and his inventiveness are qualities so far above most other contemporary poets that, well, what can I say? He's the real thing. Today, like Geoffrey Hill, he's very well regarded in the UK, and virtually unknown in the USA. This is tragic. A century from now, the names of Hill and Muldoon will be known, and most US poets will be forgotten - but that's another topic.

If you like difficult but beautiful poetry, pick this up. If you are into pretty easy, conversational verse that you can grasp from a first reading - stay away!

Only the best living poet.
Forget Seamus Heaney, forget Galway Kinnell.Paul Muldoon is the thing.This is an excellent collection of his work.Click around here, find and read a couple of his poems, and you'll know. ... Read more

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This book introduces the general reader to some of the main critical discussions surrounding Muldoon's work. The Poetry of Paul Muldoon unearths difficult questions of form with a metaphysical significance that is suitable to our times. ... Read more

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A selection of work by the Irish poet, Paul Muldoon, including extracts from "Meeting the British" and "Annals of Chile", which have been published since the last selection appeared in 1986. ... Read more

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An extraordinarily successful collaboration between the Irish poet, Paul Muldoon and the acclaimed Scottish photographer, Norman McBeath, in which there's an uncanny relationship between word and black-and-white image. Although a McBeath photograph (of a statue of Apollo wrapped in polythene) is directly invoked in one poem, much of the success of this beautifully produced book has to do with indirection and evocation. It's as if this book presents us with a distinctly new genre - photoetry. ... Read more

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An anthology of poems about creatures of many kinds, including some perhaps more fanciful than real. The poets range from Homer to the present. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Faber Book of Beasts
Thank goodness for Amazon.com, I was able to get this item, as well as all of the others before my Degree course began. The item arrived in plenty of time and in the condition I was expecting, many thanks to the seller AND to Amazon.com.

Animals can bring out the best even in the worst of us...
One of the best books out if you want to read poetry about animals through the ages.

You have poets obscure and famous poets such as G.K.Chesterton who writes about "The Donkey" who had his hour, "one far fierce hour and sweet" p73/74 and William Blake's "The Tyger" a haunting picture of beauty and violencep271, alongside old and much loved rhymes like "Goosey Gander" p 101 and "Hickory Dickory Dock" p114.

This is a glorious book that is both refreshing and nostalgic and is well worth having on your bookshelf for reference and fun. ... Read more

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My heart is heavy. For I saw Fionnuala,
"The Gem of the Roe," "The Flower of Sweet Strabane,"
when a girl reached down into a freezer bin
to bring up my double scoop of vanilla.
-"White Shoulders"

Seamus Heaney has called his colleague Paul Muldoon "one of the era's true originals." While Muldoon's previous book, The Annals of Chile, was poetry at an extreme of wordplay and formal complexity, Hay is made up of shorter, clearer lyric poems, retaining all of Muldoon's characteristic combination of wit and profundity but appealing to the reader in new and delightful ways. His eighth book, it is also his most inviting-full of joy in language, fascination with popular culture, and enthusiasm for the writing of poetry itself. This is the first of his books to really capture the effect of America on his poetic sensibility, which is like a magnet for impressions and the miscellany of the culture.
Amazon.com Review
Though Paul Muldoon's voice is thoroughly his own, a taste forturbulent rhythms and fantastical journeys firmly links him with someof our finest poets, most notably Coleridge. In "The Mud Room," thestart of this stunning collection, the speaker juxtaposes wildlydissimilar images--Pharaohs and Kikkoman soy sauce, Virgil's Georgicsand "cardboard boxes from K-Mart," ziggurats and six-packs. Why?Because in piecing together the whole of our collective humanpast--the past of Jackson Browne's "The Pretender" on the same page asthe past of Epicurus--Muldoon casts a vote for inclusion, a voteagainst exclusivity and relegation. He travels far to show such closerelations. Rather than focus on differences, we're forced to considera resemblance between rock stars and Pharaohs, and in turn a granderlikeness that joins us all.

But in drawing together common connective strands of history, culture, andemotion, Muldoon is anything but general. His language is highly originaland searching. He doesn't merely sniff dispassionately at the "otherness"of words; like an excited hound that has discovered the scent of anotheranimal, he rolls vigorously in it--and makes it his own:

So a harum-scarum
bushman, hey, would slash one forearm
with a flint, ho, or a sliver of steel
till it flashed, hey ho, like a hel-
iograph.

These poems resonate with an easy coexistence of the ordinary and theexotic.Whether he's penning rhymed haiku (rhymed haiku?)about placid farm life ("None more dishevelled / than those who seemedmost demure. / Our rag-weed revels") or quatrains about Cracow ("Intothe Vistula swollen with rain / you and I might have plunged and founda way / to beat out the black grain / as our forefathers did onthreshing day"), Muldoon's words gleam like jewels unearthed fromeveryday mud. --Martha Silano ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Clearer (relatively speaking) and a bit more accessible
...Than Muldoon's other recent volumes. Not to say it's an easy read. Bits of the Irish language, proverbs, Celtic legend, Japanese and native American lore, Hiberno-English, allusions and elisions packed with every poem, this collection does echo, as the publisher's blurb suggests, a bit of Muldoon's adapted state of New Jersey's forebear William Carlos Williams at times. His translations of the old Irish verse Pangur Ban and two Rilke poems show that he's skilled at rendering into solidity other voices besides the many within his own imagination tumbling forth here in typically erudite and rather daunting fashion.

Sleeve notes--inspired by on various rock albums anticipates Nick Hornby's essays on rock songs by a few years, and Muldoon's growing immersion in his American surroundings and family life makes for entertaining, if again often puzzling, explorations. This book's best read following Madoc and The Annals of Chile, for it builds upon relationships established in these previous collections, which are even more challenging than the usually briefer forays into the metaphorical and metaphysical here, one of the best of which begins the book.

"The Mudroom" casts about a heap of junk and treasure to uncover ancient Judaic archetypes within a country shed--just one example of the juxtapositions Muldoon's mind works within to create disturbing as well as enlightening scenarios that linger and jumble in the mind after you close these dense if terse pages.

Hay?


An Irish Professor at Princeton, Paul Muldoon wrote a book called "Hay".Muldoon is said to be one of the most inventive poets of this day and age.Paul Muldoon seemingly is so unpredictable at times that he stirs up problems with his readers and critics. Muldoon's 90 Haiku is just an example of his unique works.Muldoon has the ability to create a poem out of anything, but instead on enlightening his readers, he tends to confuse them.

In "Hopewell Haiku", Muldoon seems to set up this piece by changing seasons in every couple haikus.He says so much in so few words.Paul Muldoon uses a vast vocabulary in "Hay" that may be unfamiliar to his average audience.Actually, having a dictionary handy is mandatory to even slightly understand some of Muldoon's works!

Muldoon excels in technique and I don't think he'd ever run out of new ways to construct and reconstruct poetry.A very noticeable style to a reader that Muldoon seems to use in a few poems is: ending every sentence in a stanza with the same word.Interestingly enough, the word has a different meaning each time (ex: "....so I learned first hand...the sleight of a hand...writing in open hand")!Another slick format that Muldoon uses in "Hay" is the use of "Hybrid Proverbs" to put together an entire poem.He some how takes all different sayings that one may have heard some time during their lifetime, puts them all together, and they make sense!This is exactly proof of why they say he's unpredictable in his style and language.

Hay has its good aspects. It's more suitable for a more advanced poet than a beginner.It's also for a person who finds pleasure from unraveling the hidden secrets of difficult material.Muldoon is a very talented, more advanced poet. Hay" is worth reading, if not to understand, then to experience the vast techniques and styles of Paul Muldoon.

Delightful
I enjoyed the opportunity of hearing a reading by Paul Muldoon last spring and this semester I'm taking a writing of poetry class. I had to do a presentation on a living poet and I picked up one of his latest collections and it's like the title of this review, delightful. There are so many different styles of eccentric poems in this one collection and some that contain such obscure literary references that it invokes a sense of bewilderment and leads to a trail of website-hunting to figure out what he's talking about. But it's okay, because many of the poems can be enjoyed at face value, but if you want to dig deeper you can. He's one dang clever guy and this collection is definitely enjoyable.

Great book.Absolutely wonderful.Buy it.
Great book.Absolutely wonderful.Buy it.

(I had written a longer,more interesting review, but it was apparently lost on the web.)

Mr. Muldoon's Neighborhood
Is it possible for one person to be the best American poet and the best Irish poet at the same time?Muldoon certainly lays a strong claim to bothtitles: his Irishness lends him a musicality far superior to that achievedby most contemporary Americans, while his American side is the source of afar-ranging brashness, an ambition, scope and post- modern adventurousnessthat makes many Irish poets look rather, well, staid."Hay" is abrave and experimental volume, more Byronic than ironic (though there'splenty of both) that takes place in a mostly domestic setting.As Muldoonwanders around his house and neighborhood and reports on what passes beforehis eyes and through his mind, the reader is treated to a wild andceaseless cinematic display that is at times violent, at times kooky, notinfrequently nostalgic, and often reminiscent of of Borges, Rilke, orBerryman (not to mention Kurosawa, Kubrick, and Scorsese.)"LongFinish" probably is the most moving piece here, one of the best lovepoems of the last ten or twenty years, while "The Bangle, SlightReturn" is is an intriguing crossword slash jigsaw puzzle thatpromises boundless entertainment and befuddlement.This book should besold in airports, distributed free to hotel rooms . . . it's groovy, baby! ... Read more

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Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Seamus Heaney, Van Morrison, Louis Macneice, Paul Muldoon, Ciarán Carson, Nick Laird, Tom Paulin, Derek Mahon, Gerald Dawe, James Simmons, Padraic Fiacc, Stewart Parker, Geraldine Clinton Little, Helen Waddell, W. R. Rodgers, Peter Mcdonald, Sinéad Morrissey, Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Sammy Duddy, Michael Longley, Medbh Mcguckian, Richard Rowley, Geoffrey Squires, Colette Bryce, Leontia Flynn, the Belfast Group, Frank Ormsby, Robert Greacen, Brendan Cleary, Maureen Boyle, Brendan Hamill, Seamus Deane, William Peskett, Weaver Poets, Gerard Mckeown, Michael Mckimm, W. F. Marshall, Mairtín Crawford, James Fenton, Francis Harvey. Excerpt:Brendan Cleary (born 1958) is a poet who was born in Carrickfergus , Northern Ireland but lives in England . Early years Cleary attended Carrickfergus Grammar School in Northern Ireland. He moved from Northern Ireland in 1977 to Middlesbrough , a large town in northeast England, in order to attend Teesside Polytechnic . He then settled in Newcastle, where he founded Echo Room Press and was also the editor of Stand Magazine . Cleary earned a MA from Sunderland Polytechnic, which later became University of Sunderland in 1992. His works His collections include The Irish Card , Sacrilege , and Stranger in the House published by Wrecking Ball Press . His most recent work, Weightless , has been "described as a modern blues". Cleary lives in Brighton , located on the south coast of England, where he also teaches poetry .References (URLs online) Websites (URLs online) A hyperlinked version of this chapter is at Brendan Hamill (b. 1945, Belfast , Northern Ireland ) is a poet and writer.He was born in Belfast and grew up in West Belfast . His family home was on the Whiterock Road facing the City Cemetery. He worked for several years in England before returning to... ... Read more

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Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, The Annals of Chile confirms Paul Muldoon’s stature as one of the most talented poets of his generation. The heart of the book is the long poem “Yarrow,” in which Muldoon’s powers of insight and wordplay and surprising association are on exuberant display: evoking the 1960s, the poet conjures up a boundless historical present peopled at once by Davy Crockett and Tristan Tzara and Wild Bill Hickok, by Maud Gonne and Michael Jackson, all bought swifly and vividly to life by his fantastical imagination. The collection also contains a group of shorter poems, including “The Birth,” a delicate lyric which celebrates the arrival of a baby girl; “Incantata,” a deeply felt elegy to a former lover; a Muldoon’s inspired adaptation of an episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
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Customer Reviews (2)

Extraordinarily rich, too much to take in at once or twice!
Muldoon here follows his overwhelmingly learned Madoc with another circumnavigation of all his forbiddingly clever and sometimes satisfying contours of his (not our) known world. Part one, as with the previous volume, takes in bits of this realm and, oin Brazil, confounds me even as in the tender and lacerating Incantata, moves me with its honesty at a past amour. The Sonogram and Footling and The Birth track his daughter's arrival, while the long poem that comprises most of this volume, Yarrow, takes on the 60s, colonialism, a sheltered Irish childhood, Arthurian figures, drug culture, Romans, the Wild West, and "the loathsome Mike Oldfield" to name a few topics.

Not for the fainthearted, but rewarding in fits and starts and never less than ambitious, although with no annotations or guidance, each reader will never get out of it a fraction of the learning Muldoon's put into it. This criticism, as Incantata avers, is not unknown to the poet, but it does discourage all but the boldest who journey into a phantasmagorical and ever-changing depiction of intelligence at its craftiest and most conniving. Be prepared to stumble a lot, but don't give up yet.

Muldoon's best
Lordy, it would be ANYBODY'S best.Paul Muldoon's work has always been great but *The Annals of Chile* is a breakthrough."Cows" and "Twice" arepitch- and picture-perfect and the intricacies andexpansiveness of "Yarrow" could keep me occupied and entertainedfor months, but more than anything else it is the unforgettable"Incantata" that makes this book a treasure.Who knew that poetslike this still existed?(Only in Ireland, I suppose -- and by the way, ifyou like Muldoon make sure to check out conationals like Michael Longleyand Ciaran Carson. A good time is guaranteed to be had by all.) ... Read more

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Subtitled A Mystery, this verse narrative collects several poems concerning the so-called "Pantisocracy" (meaning a state ruled equally by all), a utopian scheme devised and later abandoned by the 18th-century poet-philosophers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. What if they had indeed set up such an ideal community on the banks of the Susquehanna?That is the crux of this book's long and fascinating title poem, which depicts events via the mind's eye of one of Southey's reputed descendants.

The poems in this book also focus more directly on the legend of Madoc himself, the Welsh prince who some believe came to America 300 years before Columbus and sired a line of Welsh-speaking Indians.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Colbert's Orders
Stephen Colbert read from this with Paul Muldoon.I didn't really care for the poem, but if Stephen Colbert reads it it must be a 5/5.

Colbert thought it was good, so it must be
While I have never actually read this, or heard of this guy before he appeared on the Colbert Report, it must be pure genius because Colbert said so.If anyone disagrees, you have the Colbert Nation to contend with.In my humble opinion, or at least the one Colbert gave me, this should be the number one poetry book in the nation by tomorrow morning.Talk about a Colbert bump.

This got me excited about poetry again
I'd put off this work fearing its opacity. Muldoon's progressed into ever more difficult territory in his collections, and for a poet still relatively young (just over 50), he reminds me of a musical prodigy (first volume at 23) who's not fallen victim to trends, nostalgia, or predictability. I tackled these 250 poems ready for a challenge, and received one. The headings with a major Western thinker helped me in the way that Joyce's scheme aided readers of Ulysses: the titles are detached from the work--in brackets--yet need to be integrated into the poetic sequences.

Like Joyce's Homeric template, how each thinker fits into the poem below remains rather obscure to those of us lacking a knowledge of 250 big names in Western thought. Puns, wordplay, imagery, and content sometimes surfaced recognisably, but many of the names were only vaguely recalled by me or not at all. Surely a thesis awaits on their correspondences. Meanwhile, the narrative itself remains clever throughout. Its fragmentation depicts well the colonial utopian dream being shattered by Native and post-colonial realities, although I was disappointed that the whole Madoc-Mandan-"Welsh Indian" topic remained, as the subtitle perhaps indicates, a "mystery" barely acknowledged.

Muldoon's more engaging, IMHO, than his near-counterpart in age and origin Seamus Heaney, for PM possesses less of a gravitas and more intellectual playfulness in his concentration of an almost cinematic, and non-agrarian, employment of myth, action, and reaction within the mind of his characters. He's set himself a grand canvas upon which to paint his masterpiece here, and he's not so transparent that he easily exhausts close readings. Like musicians in it for the long haul, he's still improving after decades of honing his craft, and this work, while surely for a rather recondite reader, rewards and entices in its flirtatious teasing of what we can know and what remains enigmatic, a mystery despite manifest destiny and all the philosophies we can accumulate, in books or in life's own battle.

Masterpiece
An Irish poet who has become, or must be becoming, an American poet does more than bridge the Atlantic with this grand work, singlehandedly with it he redefines American literature.Monticello through Lewis and Clark to Chomsky, Detrrida and Hawking, he, phrasing in its final lines, "...has sent a shiver, de dum, de dum,..."The poem's complexity pushes the sum of all Western tradition from the Classical Greeks to sinter in the American crucible.It is a poem about our history.

Difficult but brilliant
Even as a longtime fan of Muldoon's, expecting a certain amount of obscurity, I found this book-length poem unexpectedly difficult.The text is studded with obscure historical and poetic references, no doubt intentionally producing a constant feeling that one is missing some of the point.But the sheer virtuosity of the work more than makes up for it -- the profundity and humor it provokes in its reader, the formal and technical excellence, and the sheer hubristic ambition of it all.(Who writes book-length poems anymore?)Muldoon is perhaps the greatest living poet writing in English, Nobel or no Nobel.Do read this. ... Read more

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This eagerly awaited volume in the celebrated Best American Poetry series reflects the latest developments and represents the state of the art today. Paul Muldoon, the distinguished poet and international literary eminence, has selected -- from a pool of several thousand published candidates -- the top seventy-five poems of the year.

With insightful comments from the poets illuminating their work, and series editor David Lehman's perspicacious foreword, The Best American Poetry 2005 is indispensable for every poetry enthusiast. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

assigning imprimaturs in your sleep, muldoon
it is hard to imagine a poet wordier than muldoon, "guest editor," but evidently there are, alphabetically ordered, a platoon of them.importantly though, paul muldoon is surely gifted, or has been in some previous life, some life here shed in evident order to stand naked and distressingly unashamed in the heated gaze of the passle of muldoon-ettes that he ostensibly (it is hard to imagine but is evidently so) has selected as representatives of a year's worth of american poetic effort. Surprise: most of them sound rather like Muldoon. Though it is a Muldoon non compos mentis and otherwise compromised by the blind staggers. Perhaps he was sidelined in recovery somewhere and assigned the rounding up of poets to a sightless underling. With few exceptions the poems aboard this sinking ship specialize in congealed imagery; that is, great slovenly gobbets of verbiage fast frozenat sea in the hope they would "pass." Poems impossible to decipher (by dint of having been composed with clarity farthest from anyone's mind), and unlikely to inspire a reader to try. although i am uncomfortable being so sweepingly condemnatory, i would despise myself the more deeply for scrounging after worth in bedlam...that is, in an atmosphere evidently intolerant of pride while unshrinkingly supportive of an over-riding disdain for communication. My apologies to Mr. Muldoon if it is a case of his name being used without permission.

Vivid Portraits of Mature Recollections
"Your burglaries leave no thumbprint
Mine, too, are silent
I do my best imagining at night,
And you do yours with the help of shadows.

Like actors rehearsing a play,
The dark ones withdrew
Into remote corners of the room
The rest of us sat in expectation
Of your burning oratory."

~from Sunlight by Charles Simic

The maturity of the poems in The Best American Poetry 2005 is instantly apparent the moment you read "In View of the Fact" by A.R. Ammons. This is a deeply thoughtful collection of poems best addressed when you are in a contemplative mood. Within the pages there are many surprises, lovely conclusions and especially creative thought patterns. Sexuality and death seem to be themes throughout, but there is also humor and cleverly designed rhymes the wittiest poets must long to master.

"Ants" by Vicki Hudspith is especially comical while Mary Karr's poem about her son is especially heart-warming and leans more towards a serious realization of life's complexity within expectation. Richard Garcia's "Adam and Eve's Dog" lightens a topic most would find quite serious and Edward Field's poem of praise has a beautiful freeing conclusion with metaphorical appeal.

"If I were Japanese I'd write about magnolias
in March, how tonal, each bud long as a pencil,
sheathed in celadon suede, jutting from a cluster
of glossy leaves. I'd end the poem before anything
bloomed, end with rain swelling the buds
and the sheaths bursting, then falling to the grass
like a fairy's castoff slippers, like candy wrappers,
like spent firecrackers."
~ Beth Ann Fennelly, pg. 46

What I am most impressed by in this collection of poems, is the truthfulness and the straightforward invitation into this sincerity. There is a cleverness in the crafting of each idea (I Want to be Your Shoebox) and at times profound lessons can appear through the viewpoint of a poet who sees the world a little more intensely (The Poets March on Washington). Jane Hirshfield's "Burlap Sack" paints an image of bondage and freedom, while Linda Pastan reveals a different type of cultural freedom.

Paul Muldoon's selections also provide a consistent mood and his love for rhyme and complex sentence structures invites you into a world of poems that reveal intricate details of your own life. At times his selections are realistic and edgy with mature considerations and at other times he has selected profound moments to inspire a more heartfelt appreciation for beauty. Both ideas seem to weave together to form a painting of how life is really lived in a realistic setting, as opposed to a more romantic rendering of ideas within a dreamscape of fantasy poems. Now and then, a line in a poem is so highly significant you can read the entire poem and then suddenly awaken upon a stunning moment.

"Wanting the tight buds of my loneliness
to swell and split, not die in wanting.
It was why I rushed through everything,
why I tore away at the perpetual gauze
between me and the stinging world"
~ pg. 133, Chase Twichell

I can also highly recommend the 2006 edition of The Best American Poetry, which is enhanced with pop culture references and a distinctly contemporary mood. As with all the books edited by David Lehman, the "Foreword" is well worth reading. David Lehman's experience in the world of poetry reveals ideas that will be of great interest to anyone interested in poetry culture.

~The Rebecca Review

Best of the Best
BAP2005 surely is a high point for the quality of the volume's poetry and the number of internet offerings included.

the best american poetry 2005
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Product Description
The first full-length book on the life and work of Paul Muldoon, specifically written as a detailed and accessible introduction to his work. ... Read more

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Literary criticism of author Paul Muldoon. ... Read more

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