Paul Muldoon

"The title of Horse Latitudes, Paul Muldoon's tenth collection of poetry, refers to those areas thirty degrees north and south of the equator where sailing ships tend to stand becalmed, where stasis (if not stagnation) is the order of the day, and from where sailors, in the days when Spanish vessels transported horses to the West Indies, would throw their live cargo overboard to lighten the load and conserve food and water. From Bosworth Field to Beijing, from the Battle of the Boyne to Bull Run, from a series of text messages written to the nineteenth-century Irish poet Tom Moore to an elegy for Warren Zevon, and from post-Agreement Ireland to George W. Bush's America, this book presents us with fields of battle and fields of debate, in which we often seem to have come to a standstill, but in which language that has been debased may yet be restruck and made current to our predicament."--Jacket.

Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, finds him working a rich vein that extends from the apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, where he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives.

"In To Ireland, I, the Clarendon Lectures in English 1998, Paul Muldoon produces a firework display of scholarship, wit, and intrigue, in a wander through the alphabet of Irish literature. From a mischievous beginning in Amergin - 'the first poet of Ireland' - Muldoon forges link after link between the disparate and the unlikely, until modernists and medievalists appear as congenial neighbours on the half-lit, literary streets of Ireland." "A provocative A to Z, with a particular emphasis on the continuity of the tradition, To Ireland, I is a jaunt through Irish literature from one of the most important poets of his generation."--Jacket.

The Annals of Chile, Paul Muldoon's first book of new poetry since the acclaimed Madoc: A Mystery (1991), confirms the widely held view that he is the most talented poet of his generation. The heart of the book is the long poem "Yarrow," in which all 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 brought swiftly and vividly to life by his fantastical imagination. The book also contains a group of shorter poems, including "The Birth," a delicate lyric which celebrates the arrival of a baby daughter; "Incantata," a powerful elegy to a former lover; and Muldoon's inspired adaptation of an episode from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Art, Muldoon writes, "builds from pain, from misery, from a deep-seated hurt / a monument to the human heart"; and here, out of strong emotion, in memorable language, Muldoon has once again fashioned rich and vital poetry.

This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking - nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante. The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a "comedy," and it concludes with a discussion of the "ends of poetry" in a variety of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry "end" does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise. Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provencal poets, Mallarme, and Holderlin, among others).

"A new collection of poems by Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Muldoon"--

The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook is a collection of personal, food-related stories with recipes from 76 contemporary artists and writers inspired by a book from 1961, The (original) Artists' & Writers' Cookbook In The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook, Anthony Doerr lures us out into the wild to find huckleberries and happiness. Neil Gaiman makes a perfectly eerie cheese omelet while Ed Ruscha associates his cactus omelet with “a time of doom.” Yiyun Li eats rations in Beijing while Edwidge Danticat prepares a soup to celebrate freedom. Nelson DeMille reminisces about a meal he ate 40 years ago when serving in Vietnam; Kamrooz Aram recalls childhood “picnics” in his basement in Tehran during air raids. Sanford Biggers updates a soul food classic—“something tasty to lessen the bitter taste of consistent, systematic oppression.” Paul Muldoon and Aimee Bender conjure food-related apocalyptic visions. Marina Abramović shares a dish best consumed on top of a volcano, Elissa Schappell dreams of playing Serge Gainsbourg records to snails, and Padgett Powell tastes a dish that reverses time and space. Daniel Wallace woos with an eggplant sandwich. Francesca Lia Block tells us how to fall in love. The essays are at turns comedic and heart-wrenching, personal and apocalyptic, with recipes that are enchanting to read and recreate. One part cookbook and one part intimate self-portrait, The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook is a portal into the kitchens and personal lives of an unmatched collection of contemporary artists and writers.

"In his new book of rock lyrics, Paul Muldoon goes back to the essential meaning of the term 'lyric' -- a short poem sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument. These words are written for music most assuredly, with half an ear to Yeats's ballad-singing porter drinkers and half to Cole Porter -- and indeed, many of them double as rock songs, performed by Wayside Shrines, the Princeton-based music collective of which Muldoon is a member. Their themes are the classic themes of song: lost love, lost wars, Charlton Heston, barbed wire, pole dancers, cellulite, Hegel, elephants, Oedipus, more barbed wire, Buddy Holly, Jersey peaches, Julius Caesar, Trenton, cockatoos, and the Youngers (Bob and John and Jim and Cole)"--Jacket.