“One of the best in a generation of Northern Irish poets born since World War II, Mr. Muldoon has come to be known for . . . a witty, subversive instinct that undermines clichés, truisms, eternal verities, and his own previous sentences . . . Madoc is an outré movie spectacular . . . a tour de force.” —Lucy McDiarmid, The New York Times Book Review

“More than language--and no one who loves words can fail to be amazed by Muldoon--there is Madoc's story . . . Muldoon's magic consists of lifting Southey's shrewdly calculating apostasy off the pages he wrote and transporting it, full-blown, to a vulgar, brawling, optimistic America--an America that of course remains in the warp and woof of the immediate one.” —Geoffrey Stokes, The Village Voice

“Muldoon's reinvention of himself as an American writer is a source of vast entertainment. Madoc is also, though, a profoundly Irish book . . . Muldoon shows us a mind at work, teasing, improvising, listening, reading, loving, and his apparently impersonal narrative turns out to be a winning self-portrait. It is a dazzling achievement.” —Lachlan MacKinnon, Times Literary Supplement

“What takes the reader through the poem is pleasure and puzzlement in roughly equal measure . . . Essentially, [Muldoon] is taking his style for a walk, and the style is mesmerising . . . Every reading--and still, more, every new bit of information--makes Madoc a cleverer and more imposing piece of work . . . [Muldoon is] one of the most metaphoric poets alive, in whom words and facts and things themselves are . . . comprehensively and gracefully destabilized.” —Michael Hofman, London Review of Books