Hay

Though Muldoon's previous book featured verse of wordplay and formal complexity, Hay primarily offers shorter, clearer lyric poems. His eighth book, it is also perhaps his most inviting. Along with the Irish author's trademark blend of wit and profundity, we find in these poems the first clear traces of America's impact on his sensibility.

Praise

"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

About the Author(s)

Paul Muldoon

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.

photo: Peter Cook

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