The Annals of Chile: Poems

by Paul Muldoon

Overview

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, The Annals of Chile confirms Paul Muldoon's stature as one of the most talented poets of his generation. The heart of the book is the long poem "Yarrow," in which Muldoon's powers of insight and wordplay and surprising association are on exuberant display: evoking the 1960s, the poet conjures up a boundless historical present peopled at once by Davy Crockett and Tristan Tzara and Wild Bill Hickok, by Maud Gonne and Michael Jackson, all bought swifly and vividly to life by his fantastical imagination. The collection also contains a group of shorter poems, including "The Birth," a delicate lyric which celebrates the arrival of a baby girl; "Incantata," a deeply felt elegy to a former lover; a Muldoon's inspired adaptation of an episode from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374524562
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/30/1995
Pages:	191
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.46(d)

About the Author

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. He lives and teaches in Princeton, New Jersey. Better known for his poetry, his works include Poems 1968-1998, Hay and Moy Sand and Gravel.

Table of Contents

Part 1
	Ovid: Metamorphoses	3
	Brazil	6
	Oscar	8
	Milkweed and Monarch	10
	Twice	12
	Incantata	13
	The Sonogram	29
	Footling	30
	The Birth	31
	Cesar Vallejo: Testimony	32
	Cows	33
Part 2
	Yarrow	39

Editorial Reviews

Paul Muldoon is one of the most inventive and ambitious poets working today. The Annals of Chile is his best book yet.” —Lawrence Norfolk, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

The core of Muldoon's (Madoc: A Mystery) latest collection is the rambunctiously imaginative long poem ``Yarrow,'' which offers, among three-dozen other thematic preoccupations, a lover's search for a ``pugilist-poet.'' In the poem, Muldoon sees himself as the leading contender-and in the boxing ring of contemporary poetry, the metaphor works nicely, as well. This writer is a heavyweight with a subtle, lightning touch. Erudite and witty, he's the Cassius Clay of poetic craft. ``Yarrow,'' for example, recaptures the hedonism of the '60s via a super-literary protagonist and his enclave of smart, wickedly dissipated friends. The loose narrative of their adventures is also inhabited by figures from antiquity, medieval England, Cold-War American pop culture and so on. As is customary with Muldoon, the ride is both harrowing and exuberant. His facility with verse improves with each book, and the streak continues here. A minor beef: the Irish-born poet is becoming almost too dense and whimsical. Still, Annals will fatten his reputation on this side of the Atlantic. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly