Selected Poems, 1968-2014

"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."