Horse Latitudes

"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.