One Thousand Things Worth Knowing: Poems

by Paul Muldoon

Overview

Another wild, expansive collection from the eternally surprising Pulitzer Prize–winning poet

Smuggling diesel; Ben-Hur (the movie, yes, but also Lew Wallace's original book, and Seosamh Mac Grianna's Gaelic translation); a real trip to Havana; an imaginary trip to the Château d'If: Paul Muldoon's newest collection of poems, his twelfth, is exceptionally wide-ranging in its subject matter—as we've come to expect from this master of self-reinvention. He can be somber or quick-witted—often within the same poem: The mournful refrain of "Cuthbert and the Otters" is "I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead," but that doesn't stop Muldoon from quipping that the ancient Danes "are already dyeing everything beige / In anticipation, perhaps, of the carpet and mustard factories."

If this masterful, multifarious collection does have a theme, it is watchfulness. "War is to wealth as performance is to appraisal," he warns in "Recalculating." And "Source is to leak as Ireland is to debt." Heedful, hard-won, head-turning, heartfelt, these poems attempt to bring scrutiny to bear on everything, including scrutiny itself. One Thousand Things Worth Knowing confirms Nick Laird's assessment, in The New York Review of Books, that Muldoon is "the most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets," an experimenter and craftsman who "writes poems like no one else."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374536688
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/12/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	664,425
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Paul Muldoon is the author of eleven previous books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Moy Sand and Gravel (FSG, 2002). He is the Howard G. B. Clark University Professor at Princeton.

Editorial Reviews

[Muldoon’s] technical and linguistic brilliance is probably second to none; the poems are the textual equivalent of a high-wire act, with juggling.” —Fran Brearton, The Guardian

“A stylish volume . . . Its elegant layout echoes almost subliminally what we have come to expect from this master of the trickster elements within language.” —Fiona Sampson, The Independent

“The collection is dazzlingly complex . . . these poems show what a master Muldoon is in his own right.” —Charlotte Runcie, The Telegraph

“A professor at Princeton, poetry editor at the New Yorker, rock musician and the subject of extensive critical attention, the Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon is at the summit of a career which began in spectacular fashion with the publication of New Weather in 1973, when the poet was just twenty-one. One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, his twelfth collection, represents a consolidation rather than an extension of the elaborate and highly distinctive poetic voice he has established in the intervening four decades. His characteristic verbal hi-jinks - endless rhymes, concealed or oblique linkages and parallelisms, abrupt shifts of register, serpentine syntax, an urge to pun that borders on the pathological - provide further evidence of the poet's astounding technical gifts.” —Oli Hazzard, The Times Literary Supplement

“Muldoon opens his 12th book of verse with an impressive set piece, one major Irish poet's lament for another. . . these densely worked poems are meant to be re-read. . . powerful . . .with witty pleasures and strong feelings to be unlocked and cherished.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

11/17/2014
“I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead.” Muldoon (Maggot) opens his 12th book of verse with an impressive set piece, one major Irish poet’s lament for another. The elegy makes the Pulitzer Prize–winner and New Yorker poetry editor’s fact-filled, intricately rhymed style sound not so much playful as meant to stave off grief, “hemmed in every bit as much// by sorrow as by the crush of cattle.” There follow poems built around decades-old memories, reactions to paintings, and reactions to poems by Lorca, Pessoa, Dickinson, and Muldoon himself—there is even an explicit sequel, “Cuba (2).” As loyal readers expect, there’s also a stack of proper nouns worth Googling, and an assortment of bafflingly allusive objects: “the face of a barstool/ covered in a whale’s foreskin,” or “the chestnut tree where a soul was known to roost// before it was set in linotype.” Unlike Muldoon’s books of rock lyrics and literary criticism, these densely worked poems are meant to be re-read. All the pointers to earlier work, and to uncommon knowledge, make it less than ideal (except for the Heaney elegy) as an entry point to the Muldooniverse, but it’s powerful nonetheless, with witty pleasures and strong feelings to be unlocked and cherished. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 11/01/2014
The informational content of Muldoon's 12th collection (after The Word on the Street: Rock Lyrics) may well approach the claim of its title. We learn, for example, that "some early fragmentation bombs/ were the calcified brains/ of Celtic warriors" and that "The best baseball bats are turned from hibiscus." Through montages of esoteric vocabulary tamed by virtuoso technique and erudite wit, the Irish poet's lyrics bristle with dodgems, merkin-toads, and dunnocks, moving confidently if restlessly through topics and locales as varied as the American Civil War, Northumbrian monasteries, chicken farms, and contemporary Havana. A world traveler and voracious student of history, Muldoon seeks to articulate eccentric connections through time and space, mapping a virtual geo-linguistic universe as personal as it is omniscient. VERDICT Though frequent access to Wikipedia and the Oxford English Dictionary may be necessary to fully appreciate Muldoon's encyclopedic intricacies, the brilliant surfaces of his poems alone can inspire readers "to think of literature/ as magical rather than magisterial."—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Library Journal