Hay: Poems

by Paul Muldoon

Overview

My heart is heavy. For I saw Fionnuala,
"The Gem of the Roe," "The Flower of Sweet Strabane,"
when a girl reached down into a freezer bin to bring up my double scoop of vanilla.
-"White Shoulders"

Seamus Heaney has called his colleague Paul Muldoon "one of the era's true originals." While Muldoon's previous book, The Annals of Chile, was poetry at an extreme of wordplay and formal complexity, Hay is made up of shorter, clearer lyric poems, retaining all of Muldoon's characteristic combination of wit and profundity but appealing to the reader in new and delightful ways. His eighth book, it is also his most inviting-full of joy in language, fascination with popular culture, and enthusiasm for the writing of poetry itself. This is the first of his books to really capture the effect of America on his poetic sensibility, which is like a magnet for impressions and the miscellany of the culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374526191
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/10/1999
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Paul Muldoon, born in Northern Ireland in 1951, lives with his wife, Jean Hanff Korelitz, and their daughter in New Jersey, where he chairs the creative writing program at Princeton University.

Editorial Reviews

His boldest and most engaging poems yet.” —Michael Hofmann, The Times (London)

“Every generation has to clear a space to make itself heard, and Muldoon's way to clear a space in a tradition that includes William Butler Yeats, a visionary and urbane poet, and Patrick Kavanagh, an earthy country poet, and seamus Heaney, who some have said is a perfect fusion of the two impulses, was to write a different poetry altogether, witty, cosmopolitan, playful, and postmodern.” —Robert Hass, The Washington Post Book World

“A partial formal inventory of [this book] would include a stealthy chain of sonnets, a wicked ghazal, sinewy couplets, deadpan concrete verse experiments, a kaleidoscopic ninety-part haiku journal, and, of course, all those canting half- and quarter-rhymes. . . . Crafty, ruthless, and beautiful.” —Robert Polito, Bookforum

From the Publisher

At its best. . .Muldoon's use of the conceit can move beyond joking, producing something genuinely new and strange. . . .What makes Muldoon's poems truly distinctive is a much more total kind of strangeness, in which not just the images but the plot, diction, references, and formal scheme are so complex as to border on incomprehensibility.
—New Republic

Adam Kirsch

More than two decades ago, Seamus Heaney wrote of his former student Paul Muldoon that his "hermetic tendency" can lead him "into puzzles rather than poems." Since then, Muldoon has evolved into a kind of anti-Heaney, creating poetic puzzles of daunting erudition and fascinating complexity, while sharpening his teacher's capacious humor into a dazzling wit. If Northern Irish poets are expected to write Wordsworthian lyric verse about their rural childhoods, Muldoon instead composes allusively postmodern, cosmopolitan poetry. Having won Britain's prestigious T.S. Eliot prize for his last collection, The Annals of Chile, Muldoon (who teaches at Princeton) here continues to amaze and bewilder readers in equal measure with his bravura. "Errata" consists entirely--in the spirit of Nabokov's Pale Fire -- of a proofreader's corrections to a faulty set of galleys: "For `Steinbeck' read `Steenbeck.'/ For `ludic' read `lucid.'" Not all of Hay is so stylistically showy. "Anonymous: Myself and Pangur" is a faithful translation of an utterly charming 9th-century Irish poem drawing parallels between the craft of the scholar-poet and his white cat: "Pangur going in for the kill/ with all his customary skill/ while I, sharp-witted, swift, and sure,/ shed light on what had been obscure." And striking a more demotic note is Muldoon's verse cycle on a series of favorite rock albums, from the Rolling Stones to Nirvana, no less exuberant. As much at home in mainstream pop culture as in the obscure corners of the literary tradition, sharp-witted Muldoon both parodies and honors with panache.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A poetic music as bizarre as a blend of the Celtic and the klezmer.

The Village Voice

Muldoon takes on the wild-eyed energy of a pub storyteller, fixing you with his eye as he attempts to show you the perfect logic of utter improbabilities; it makes for invigorating poetry.

Boston Phoenix

The Irish-born Princeton professor dazzles the ear with his eighth book of verse; full of inventive rhyme and repetitions, and seamless meters, Muldoon's work resembles the monk of his poem "Anonymous": "sharp-witted, swift, and sure." A linguistic voluptuary, Muldoon sometimes leaves readers behind with his gestures to Apollinaire, and his dense Joycean patter; but his best poems ground his visionary sensibility in everyday observation: "The Mudroom" and two poems titled "The Bangle," in particular, rely on a collage of imagery and idiom, from Yiddish slang, Asian clarity, and classical allusion to the common items found in a mudroom (hubcap, extra fridge, soft drinks). Muldoon's playful wit supports one virtuoso piece after another: a bit on the famous Siamese twins, Chang and Eng ("Lag"); a mess of fractured aphorisms and proverbs ("Symposium"), and a versified errata sheet. Less successful are his calligrammes (and other visual jokes), as well as a long sequence inspired by rock records-a forced set of personal liner notes recounting memories associated with particular albums. The ninety rhymed haiku of "Hopewell Haiku" are wonderfully anecdotal and properly spare-Muldoon holds his expansive humor in check. Throughout here, he plays on his name and returns to the simple image of his title: the one thing he knows with certainty.

Kirkus Reviews