Selected Poems, 1968-2014
by Paul Muldoon
Buy on Amazon“The most significant English-Language poet born since the second world war.” —The Times Literary Supplement Selected Poems 1968–2014 offers forty-six years of work drawn from twelve individual collections by a poet who “began as a prodigy and has gone on to become a virtuoso” (Michael Hofmann). Hailed by Seamus Heaney as “one of the era’s true originals,” Paul Muldoon seems determined to escape definition, yet this volume, compiled by the poet himself, serves as an indispensable introduction to his trademark combination of intellectual hijinks and emotional honesty.…
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"The beauty of a collection this broad is the ease by which we can watch Paul Muldoon reckon with himself over the course of his life. As a poet who writes with a strange in-betweenness of state and sensation, he’s mired in a galaxy of his own verse: at once personal without being confessional, vexed without being angry, and dreamlike while remaining realistic. It is a thrill to watch his poetry reinvent itself as it matures — expanding, contracting and ballooning out in time — but what is most constant about Muldoon is his reliable capacity to startle with lines that strike us as if we’d just stuck our fingers into an electrical socket."
NPR Books We Love — 2016 · apps.npr.org