Product Description
'I started the sonnet sequence "Horse Latitudes" as the U.S. embarked on its foray into Iraq. The poems have to do with a series of battles (all beginning with the letter 'B' as if to suggest a 'missing' Baghdad) in which horses or mules played a major role. Intercut with those battle-scenes are accounts of a 'battle' with cancer by a former lover, here named Carlotta, and a commentary on the agenda of what may only be described as the Bush 'regime'. The title poem was written for "Something beginning with P: New Poems from Irish Poets" (O'Brien Press) and was recently translated into Chinese in celebration of a visit to Shanghai and Beijing' - Paul Muldoon. ... Read more

Product Description
This eagerly awaited volume in the celebrated Best American Poetry series reflects the latest developments and represents the last word in poetry 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. "The all-consuming interests of American poetry are the all-consuming interests of poetry all over," writes Muldoon in his incisive introduction to the volume.

The Best American Poetry 2005 features a superb company of artists ranging from established masters of the craft, such as John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, and Charles Wright, to rising stars like Kay Ryan, Tony Hoagland, and Beth Ann Fennelly.

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

Customer Reviews (3)

Vivid Portraits
"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

matt yeager is awesome
I enjoyed this book immensely.Quality entries from the usual suspects - Ashbery, Simic, Tate, Ammons - are complimented nicely by a slew of entries from lesser known poets.I won't get into each one, but I will discuss one in particular.I was most fond of Matt Yeager's narrative poem about a giant tin foil ball.It possessed a creativity that seems to me to be dwindling in most American art.You're probably saying, "a giant tin foil ball?"Trust me, this is a great work and I can't wait to see more from this young poet.

BETTER AMERICAN POETRY THAN 2004
I find that the Best American Poetry is always enjoyable.Sometimes it is enjoyable because the poems astonish and delight, and sometimes it is enjoyable to hate.2005 is surprisingly good.What one would identify as the more traditional of poetic virtues are openly on display.While certain of the poems felt gimmicky or cute, there was, running through it, an emotional intelligence and attention to the music of words that's been missing in recent volumes.This isn't surprising when one considers that its editor, Paul Muldoon, is as musically deft as any poet in the language today.

There are offerings from many of the familiars: Ashbery, Simic, Tate, Kinnell.There are also offerings from several of our great dead poets (Ammons, Justice, Bukowski), who somehow continue to be producing quality verse.This seems somewhat unfair, but perhaps poets truly are better off dead.Ammons's poem, where he mentions the flurry of death in his own life alongside other things that happen in bunches (marriages, first children) and Justice's poem about an old fisherman dancing by himself on a dock were possibly the two most moving pieces of work in the volume.Other highlights for me were Matthew Yeager's narrative poem about the huge tinfoil ball in the small city apartment (which my seven year old son also enjoyed) and Stephen Dunn's poem "Five Roses in the Morning."

Overall, I would pick this volume up.



... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Hardly quotidian, but...
An odd little book, this is more of a journal in verse than a collection of independent poems.It was published at about the same time that Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Muldoon's THE ANNALS OF CHILE, and the stylehere is quite similar to that book's long poem "Yarrow."Like"Yarrow," this sequence is highly allusive and makes plenty ofinside personal jokes as well; you don't so much hope to understand it asjust go along for the ride.What mitigates the opacity somewhat isMuldoon's playful approach to form: the entries often fall into sonnets,and there's always some kind of rhyme scheme to trace.Muldoon's trademarkplayful pararhyming is very much on display here, as when he criticizes anIrish production for making Chekhov "more Irish / than a rush." Anyone who already enjoys Muldoon should read this, but it certainlyshouldn't be the first thing you read by him. ... Read more

Product Description
A verse libretto set in a small town on the Mexican border. It features illegal immigrants and corrupt law officers, but at its heart is an old-fashioned tale of sexual jealousy and murderous revenge. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

World Premiere of Bandanna on 2/25/99 at UT Austin
The world premiere of Bandanna at the University of Texas Opera Theatre (Robert DeSimone, Diretor) combined the music of Daron Aric Hagen and words of Paul Muldoon into a two-act opera that reveals the "basic tensionbetween characters who can accept that love is earned or is temporary, andthose who demand that love be absolute." The music was wonderful, thescoring/orchestration magnificent. The performance a pleasure. The topicrelevent. I hope this text stimulates further performances of the opera. ... Read more

Product Description
In his inaugural lecture, Professor Muldoon examines in detail the first stanza of 'All Souls' Night' by W. B. Yeats, written in Oxford in 1920, and considers the extent to which it might be a free-standing construct. He concludes that the poem is not so much an 'Epilogue to A Vision', as Yeats describes it in his epigraph, but an epilogue to a series of poems by Yeats's near namesake, Keats, including his 'To Autumn', published one hundred years earlier in 1820. ... Read more

Product Description
Commissioned as the libretto for an opera by US composer Daron Arik Hagen, this piece can be read as a dramatic poem in its own right. It tells the story of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his affair with the wife of a millionaire client. ... Read more

Product Description
George Gordon was born in London in 1788, of Scottish, French and English extraction. He succeeded to a baronetcy in 1798, and as Lord Byron he was soon to become the most famous poet of his age - with the publication of "Childe Harold", in 1812 - as well as one of its most notorious characters. His career spanned a momentous period in European history, in which Byron himself was deeply involved. He left England in 1816, and died in Missolonghi, Greece (where he had gone to join the forces struggling for Greek independence) in 1824. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Notes bleed through the cheap paper used in this edition.
If you plan to underline portions of Byron's work or comment in the margins of the text, avoid this edition as any ink "bleeds" through its poor quality paper (pencil works fine). ... Read more

Product Description
A poem set on a dinosaur-ridden planet agog with odd life-forms and minor earthquakes. Bert and Brunhilde Brontosaurus are engaged in a close encounter with Tyrannosaurus Rex, and it hinges on the intervention of a curious creature which acts like a walking thesaurus. ... Read more

Product Description
Water quality concerns are not new to the Great Lakes. They emerged early in the 20th century, in 1909, and matured in 1972 and 1978. They remain a prominent part of today s conflicted politics and advancing industrial growth. The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, under the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909, became a model to the world for environmental management across an international boundary. Evolution of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreementrecounts this historic binational relationship, an agreement intended to protect the fragile Great Lakes.

One strength of the agreement is its flexibility, which includes a requirement for periodic review that allows modification as problems are solved, conditions change, or scientific research reveals new problems.
the first progress was made in the 1970s in the area of eutrophication, the process by which lakes gradually age, which normally takes thousands of years to progress, but is accelerated by modern water pollution. The binational agreement led to the successful lowering of phosphorus levels that saved Lake Erie and prevented accelerated eutrophication in the rest of the Great Lakes ecosystem. Another major success at the time was the identification and lowering of the levels of toxic contaminants that cause major threats to human and wildlife health, from accumulating PCBs and other
persistent organic pollutants.

Dave Dempsey Environmental Studies Series ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An excellent reference, as accessible to lay readers as well as students and professionals in environmental studies
Written by the founder of the Lake Michigan Federation and the Executive Director at the Canadian Environmental Law Association, Evolution Of The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement is a scholarly discussion of the Canadian- American partnership regarding the Great Lakes, the negotiation behind the Great Lakes Agreement and its evolution, the transformation of the Great Lakes Regime, and more. In addition to the detailed and heavily researched survey of history that forms the main text, the entire Great Lakes Agreement of 1972 and its 1978 revision, along with copious notes, round out this down-to-earth environmental history. An excellent reference, as accessible to lay readers as well as students and professionals in environmental studies.
... Read more

Product Description
Gathered by the renowned Irish poet, playwright, and essayist William Butler Yeats, the sixty-five tales and poems in this delightful collection uniquely capture the rich heritage of the Celtic imagination. Filled with legends of village ghosts, fairies, demons, witches, priests, and saints, these stories evoke both tender pathos and lighthearted mirth and embody what Yeats describes as “the very voice of the people, the very pulse of life.”

“The impact of these tales doesn’t stop with Yeats, or Joyce, or Oscar Wilde,” writes Paul Muldoon in his Foreword, “for generations of readers in Ireland and throughout the world have found them flourishing like those persistent fairy thorns.” ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

I loved this book as a child....
....and it is just as great - or perhaps better- now that Im older.
Yeats takes you places with this one. He introduces you to characters and creatures and mystical magical places that you dream of as a child ....but still think about as a grown-up...even tho you may not want to admit that.:) It is a sweet collection and Yeats spent a great deal of time compiling these Tales. This book should be a film. Or at least some of these tales. Yeats is the great one and if you enjoy his poetry, you will love this sweet little book. Youre never too old for tales.

A Good Introduction to Irish Fairy Tales
William Butler Yeats collects Irish fairy and folk tales in this volume.It is a pretty wide selection which covers topics such as fairies, leprechauns, merrows, puccas, ghosts, witches, giants, and more.You won't get an in depth introduction to each type of creature, but you will get a few story selections for each type of creature.This book doesn't have much commentary on the different types of creatures.It primarily focuses on folk stories concerning them.I recommend this book for anyone who hasn't had an introduction into the world of Irish folklore.I think you find it interesting.

Lightning
A beautiful selection of tales and descriptions that only Yeats could have told. We meet a variety of strange creatures and legends that have survived (thank goodness) due to Yeats' love of extraordinary things. He very well could have lived in Fairyland, you know.

From a World Long Forgotten
This is a new and expanded version of the original volume published by in 1892 under the title "Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry." It was subsequently re-titled, "Irish Fairy and Folk Tales," and has seen several editions from different publishers.
This edition, with an illuminating forward by Paul Muldoon, also has other additions that help the reader penetrate the sometimes dense and archaic language.If I had to choose between the original edition and this one, I would definitely choose this one. The main body of the book is identical to the original.
Both Yeats and Lady Gregory were especially concerned that the best of the tales from the Irish countryside be preserved before their main purveyors, the Shenaches (storytellers) vanished.Those collected here are a varied lot, and not all of them will appeal to every reader.That, however, does not affect their value at all, for here a way of life is preserved and we can look through a small window into the beliefs and habits of the Irish people in the days when the "Fairy Faith" was still common amongst them.It is probably best not to read the collection straight through, but rather peruse it, selecting from it that which most appeals.
Yeats's singular contribution is the dividing the denizens of the Irish Enchanted Countryside into categories:The Trooping Fairy, The Solitary Fairy, the Sociable Fairy, etc, together with Ghosts, Witches, Giants and the like.Within each "type" there are essays, songs, poems, hearsay, histories ... in short, something to appeal to every taste, as long as that taste has a goodly sampling of fancy about it.
These fairies are not the gossamer winged, luminous beings of Victorian paintings.These fairies are as likely to curse as to bless and it does not benefit the unwary or skeptical to offend them.Here are pookas, leprechauns, far darrig, Ban-Shees, and lanawn-shees.
These creatures were ever present to the Irish peasantry, and were forgotten with the industrialization of modern times.Fortunately, thanks to the efforts of Yeats and others like him, much of this world was preserved for us.
Some of the stories and poems retain their Irish intonation and syntax and may be difficult for some to follow, but patience will be rewarded;One can almost "hear" the storyteller and the bard.
This is a volume well worth going back to again and again.

Absolutely charming!
This absolutely charming collection of stories truly represents the best of "fairy" tales in which the fairy folk feature prominantly as well as a number of other folk beasties.WB Yeats has managed to capture all of the humor, fright, and love involved in the fairy world and it is a joy to follow him around in a world he seems to know so well. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (2)

Interested in what poets try to do? Read these lectures!
These fine lectures, given at Oxford over a period of years by Paul Muldoon, are very worthwhile to read now as essays on the art of poetry as used and developed by fifteen different well-known poets, each in his or her own way.For Muldoon's lecture on each poet, he has chosen to focus for analysis on one particular poem by that poet.The text of the chosen poem is the first item presented in each lacture.Muldoon then shows how that poet has made use of a variety of skills to create the poem.Choice of individual words, of figures of speech, of idioms, of phrases, of evocative references to times, places, experiences, and references in this specimen poem to other poems -- all are considered.Muldoon helps his audience to come to an understanding of how each particular poet drew on these elements, and on others, to choose his colors, to spin his own yarn for weaving, and then the pattern, and then to weave the fabric of his particular poem.

The lectures can be read separately, focusing on the work of the poet or poets of one's choice.But the reader will soon discover that in each successive lecture following the first one Muldoon makes reference to some of the points he has made in his earlier lectures.Thus Muldoon is proceeding to make a construct of his own out of the whole of the fifteen lectures.To understand this construct wholly, one must read and think about how each later Muldoon lecture builds upon what Muldoon has presented earlier in the lecture series.Thus, if you think about it, Muldoon has woven this whole piece of work together much in the way that he has shown us a poet builds a poem.

This isn't surprising, for Muldoon remained a poet, hmself, even as he put this series of lectures together.So this lecture series may be viewed as itself being a poetical form of analysis, by Muldoon, of the work of the fifteen poets examined.The lecture series may be considered as a tapestry woven by Muldoon out of the weaving materials he has prepared from what he has found in his analysis of the work of the fifteen poets who are the subjects of his lectures.

These lectures are worth your time to read and to consider.

Buckle-up!
This book is a collection of 15 lectures given by Mr. Paul Muldoon at Oxford England. Each lecture is dedicated to the presentation and analyses of one poem by one poet. All of these are well know favorites: ALL SOULS' NIGHT,W.B. Yeats, THE MOUNTAIN, Robert Frost, POETRY, Marian Moore, DOVER BEACH, Mathew Arnold, etc. Muldoon's presentations are fine samples of inventiveness, good taste, hyperbole, literary allusion, daring defragmentation and impeccable research. The author's innumerable literary allusion and quotation of hundreds of other poetic fragments, turn the book into a poetic potpourri, a "Journey into June" with poetry and poets. Very entertaining. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by Thomson Gale on September 1, 2007. The length of the article is 754 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Paul Muldoon. Horse Latitudes.(The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures)(Book review)
Author: William Pratt
Publication: World Literature Today (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 1, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 81Issue: 5Page: 71(2)

Article Type: Book review

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Enda Muldoon, Paul Galvin, Diarmuid Murphy, Sean Cavanagh, Colm Cooper, Tom O'sullivan, Tomás Ó Sé, Mike Mccarthy. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 51. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Enda Muldoon (Irish: Éanna Ó Maoldúin; born 11 September 1977) is an Irish Gaelic footballer who plays for Derry. He has won an Ulster Senior Football Championship and two National League titles with the county, as well as Ulster Minor, Ulster Under 21 and All-Ireland Under-21 Football Championships. He also won an All Star Award for his performances in the 2004 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship. Muldoon plays his club football for Ballinderry Shamrocks. He was instrumental in helping Ballinderry win the 2002 All-Ireland Senior Club Football Championship, and he has also won five Derry Championships and an Ulster Senior Club Football Championship with the club. Muldoon is a versatile player who can play anywhere in the forward line or in midfield. Described by Joe Brolly as "the greatest ever natural talent to have played with Derry", his repertoire of skills include his catching ability, scoring prowess, confidence on the ball, positional awareness and in particular his great passing capabilities. He currently plays at left half forward for Derry and midfield for Ballinderry. Despite often playing in the half forward line or midfield, Muldoon has consistently been a high scorer for Derry. He finished the 2001 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship with 2-10 (16) and the 2004 Championship with 3-24 (33). He finished the 2006 campaign with 1-07 (10) from two matches. His tally of 12 Championship goals is one of the highest ever in Ulster football history. Described as "one of the most talented footballers of his generation", Enda Muldoon has played in virtually all positions in the...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=7008426 ... Read more