POETRY · IRISH AUTHORS
Paul Muldoon
Also known as: PAUL MULDOON, Paul MULDOON
As world population has doubled and as the global economy has expanded sevenfold over the last half-century, our claims on the earth have become excessive.
— from Plan B
Most acclaimed
Plan B
Tomsson Black, political visionary, business genius, and underground revolutionary, plots to avenge injustice by instigating racial turmoil. The roots of racism extend far back into his ancestry, and persecution and suffering have affected many generations of his family. Tomsson's own misfortunes are the impetus for him to found a criminal underworld whose ultimate purpose is the overflow of white society. This novel, the history of Tomsson Black and an indictment of racism in America, ends in apocalypse. It is Chester Himes's ultimate statement about the destructive power of racism and his own personal fantasy of how the American Negro, through calculated acts of violence and martyrdom, could destroy the unequal system pervading American life. However, after reaching an ideological impasse, Himes, one of the angriest writers in the black protest movement, left this novel unfinished. After his death in Spain in 1984, a rumor persisted that he had left a final, unfinished Harlem story, in which he literally destroys both his Harlem backdrop and his heroes in a violent racial cataclysm. The manuscript, entitled Plan B, is that novel. It was edited and published in France, where it was widely hailed as an unfinished masterpiece by readers and critics alike. This new edition, appearing for the first time in the United States, includes an introduction by Michel Fabre (The Sorbonne) and Robert E. Skinner (Xavier University), who have prepared Plan B for publication.
Maggot
"The Most Significant English-Language Poet Born Since the Second World War."--The Times Literary Supplement. "The Poet's Poet of His Generation ... He has Created one of the Most Tumultuous and Engrossing Bodies of Work Still in Progress."--Lachalan Mackinnon, The Daily Telegraph (London). "Muldoon has Enfranchised a Whole Generation of Poets, by Freeing them into his Own Brand of Linguistic Euphoria. But What Sets Him Apart From His Imitators, and Raises him Above Them, is His Imaginative Scope and Daring ... He is a Fabulous Poet."--Stephen Romer, The Guardian. "Muldoon Seems to me One of the Five or so Best Poets Alive: to Most of Britain and Ireland, he Seems the Single Most Influential."--Stephen Burt, Boston Review. Of Plan B, an interim volume that included several of the poems in Maggot, Robert McCrum commented in The Observer that "Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to re-imagine the poet's task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection." In his eleventh full-length book, Muldoon reminds us that he is a traditional poet who is steadfastly at odds with tradition. If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn't your father's poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W.B. Yeats's remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are "sex and the dead," Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It's no accident that the centerpiece of Maggot is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its "subject" the urge to memorialize the scenes of fatal automobile accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title sequence but many of the round songs that characterize Maggot, and has led Angela Leighton, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, to see these new poems as giving readers "a thrilling, wild, fair-ground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish."--Jacket.