Muldoon, Paul 1951-

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Muldoon, Paul 1951-

PERSONAL:

Born June 20, 1951, in Armagh, Northern Ireland; son of Patrick (a laborer and gardener) and Brigid (a schoolteacher) Muldoon; married Jean Hannff Kovelitz, 1987; children: Dorothy Aoife, Asher Malachi. Education: Received B.A. from Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Creative Writing Program, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Poet. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC Radio), Belfast, Northern Ireland, radio producer, 1973-78; senior producer, 1978-85; television producer, 1985-86; Columbia University, School of Arts, part-time teacher, 1987-88; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, lecturer in writing, 1987—, part-time teacher, 1987-88, director of creative writing program, 1993—, professor of creative writing, 1995—; University of California, Berkeley, Roberta Holloway Lecturer, 1989; University of Massachusetts, visiting professor, 1989-90; University of Oxford, Oxford, England, professor of poetry, 1999-2004.

MEMBER:

Royal Society of Literature (fellow), Aosdana, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (fellow), Poetry Society of Great Britain (president), American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Eric Gregory Award, Society of Authors, 1972; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, 1982, for Why Brownlee Left; fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial, 1990; T.S. Eliot Prize, 1994; Academy Awards in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1996; Pulitzer Prize in poetry, 2003, Griffin Poetry Prize, 2003, both for Moy Sand and Gravel; Concert Music Award, American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, 2003; American Ireland Fund Literary Award, 2004; Shakespeare Prize, 2004; Aspen Prize for Poetry, 2005; European Prize for Poetry, 2006.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Knowing My Place, Ulsterman (Belfast, Northern Ireland), 1971.

New Weather, Faber (London, England), 1973.

Spirit of Dawn, Ulsterman (Belfast, Northern Ireland), 1975.

Mules (also see below), Faber (London, England), 1977.

Names and Addresses, Ulsterman (Belfast, Northern Ireland), 1978.

Why Brownlee Left (includes "Immram"), Faber (London, England), 1980, Wake Forest University Press (Winston-Salem, NC), 1981.

Immram, illustrations by Robert Ballagh, Gallery Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1980.

Out of Siberia, illustrations by Timothy Engelland, Deerfield Press (Deerfield, MA), 1982.

Quoof, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1983.

The Wishbone, Gallery Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1984.

Mules, and Early Poems, Wake Forest University Press (Winston-Salem, NC), 1985.

Selected Poems: 1968-1986, Faber (London, England), 1986, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 1987.

Meeting the British, Faber (London, England), 1987.

Madoc: A Mystery, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1991.

Incantata, Graphic Studio (Dublin, Ireland), 1994.

The Prince of the Quotidian, Wake Forest University Press (Winston-Salem, NC), 1994.

The Annals of Chile, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1995.

Kerry Slides, photographs by Bill Doyle, Gallery Press (Loughcrew, Ireland), 1996.

New Selected Poems: 1968-94, Faber (London, England), 1996.

Hopewell Haiku, illustrated by Carol J. Blinn, Warwick Studio (Easthampton, MA), 1997.

The Bangle (Slight Return), Typography Studio (Princeton, NJ), 1998.

Hay, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1998.

Poems: 1968-1998, Faber (London, England), 2001.

Unapproved Road, intaglio prints by Diarmuid Delargy, Pied Oxen (Hopewell, NJ), 2002.

Moy Sand and Gravel, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2002.

Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore, Modern Haiku Press (Lincoln, IL), 2005.

Medley for Morin Khur, Enitharmon Press (London, England), 2005.

Horse Latitudes, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2006.

DRAMA

Monkeys (television play), British Broadcasting Company, 1989.

Shining Brow (two-act opera), with music by Daron Hagen, Faber (London, England), 1993, E.C. Schirmer (Boston, MA) 1995.

Six Honest Serving Men (one-act play), Gallery Press (Loughcrew, Ireland), 1995.

(With Daron Hagen) The Waking Father: A Song Cycle in Twelve Movements (printed music), lyrics by Muldoon, music by Hagen, Roger Dean Publishing (Dayton, OH), 1996.

Bandanna (libretto), with music by Daron Hagen, Faber (London, England), 1999.

Vera of Las Vegas (one-act opera; first performed in Sligo, Ireland, 2004), with music by Daron Hagen, Gallery Press (Loughcrew, Ireland), 2001.

The Antient Concert (opera), performed in Princeton, NJ, 2005.

ESSAYS

To Ireland, I: The 1998 Clarendon Lectures, Oxford University Press (London, England), 2000.

The End of the Poem, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2006.

EDITOR

The Scrake of Dawn: Poems by Young People from Northern Ireland, Blackstaff (Belfast, Northern Ireland), 1979.

The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, Faber (London, England), 1986.

The Essential Byron, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 1988.

Czeslaw Milosz and Paul Muldoon Reading Their Poems (sound recording), Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, 1991.

The Faber Book of Beasts, Faber (London, England), 1997.

TRANSLATOR

Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, The Astrakhan Cloak, Gallery Press (Loughcrew, Ireland), 1992, Wake Forest University Press (Winston-Salem, NC), 1993.

(With Richard Martin) Aristophanes, The Birds, Gallery Press (Loughcrew, Ireland), 1999.

Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, The Fifty Minute Mermaid, Gallery Press (Loughcrew, Ireland), 2007.

Also translator of The Drowned Blackbird, Princeton University Press, and The Hebrew Book of Psalms (with Michael Thomas Davis), Farrar, Straus.

FOR CHILDREN

The O-O's Party, Gallery Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1981.

The Last Thesaurus, illustrated by Rodney Rigby, Faber (London, England), 1995.

The Noctuary of Narcissus Batt, illustrated by Markéta Prachatická, Faber (London, England), 1997.

Reverse Flannery, Random House (New York, NY), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

Paul Muldoon is one of Ireland's leading contemporary poets. His short lyrics, modified sonnets and ballads, and dramatic monologues touch on themes of love, maturation, and self-discovery, as well as Irish culture and history. Terse and highly original, Muldoon's poetry is noted for its multiplicity of meaning. "Muldoon takes some honest-to-God reading," remarked Peter Davison in the New York Times Book Review. "He's a riddler, enigmatic, distrustful of appearances, generous in allusion, doubtless a dab hand at crossword puzzles. All good poets deserve attentive readers, but Muldoon needs you to be skeptical, needs you to forget what you know (but not what he knows) and remember what he wants you to." In addition, the poet is often cited for his whimsical and unconventional linguistic devices. According to Lynn Keller, writing in Contemporary Literature, "Muldoon delights in half rhyme, gives rein to puns and homophonic suggestion, and is as interested in sonic links between words as semantic ones; employing a dazzling range in both vocabulary and allusion, he often calls attention to his own high style and imaginative high jinks."

Muldoon is the youngest member of a group of Northern Irish poets—including Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon—who gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. As a student at Queen's University, Muldoon studied under Heaney, and refined his own analytical and critical skills in weekly discussions with other poets. In 1971, at the age of nineteen, Muldoon had completed his first short collection, Knowing My Place. Two years later, he published New Weather, his first widely reviewed volume of poetry. The book secured Muldoon's place among Ireland's finest writers and helped establish his reputation as an innovative new voice in English-language poetry.

The poems in New Weather generally illuminate the complexities of seemingly ordinary things or events. Several critics have noted that the collection's multilayered, heavily magistic, and metaphoric verse explores psychological development with apparent simplicity and eloquence while offering keen insights into the subjective nature of perception. Calling the collection "the result of continuous age and aging," Roger Conover suggested in a review for Eire-Ireland, "Muldoon's is a poetry which sees into things, and speaks of the world in terms of its own internal designs and patterns." A Times Literary Supplement reviewer, however, felt that the poems in Muldoon's "highly promising collection are flawed by a vagueness of focus that dissipates the strength of original ideas."

Muldoon followed New Weather with the 1977 collection Mules, which opens with a poem reflecting Northern Ireland's civil strife. Recurring themes of political and social relevance inform the other pastorals and ballads in Mules. "The Narrow Road to the North," for instance, depicts the debilitating effects of war on a Japanese soldier who emerges from hiding, unaware that World War II has ended. The poem subtly parallels the soldier's deadened emotional state with the toll that the struggle in Ireland has taken on its citizens. As Peter Scupham noted in his Times Literary Supplement review, "Muldoon's taste for anecdote, invention, and parable shows strongly [in Mules]," and he claimed that the collection is "a handsome promise of good poems to come." In Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978, Heaney deemed Mules "a strange, rich second collection" and judged the poet "one of the very best."

By the time Muldoon's next volume of poetry, Why Brownlee Left, was published in 1980, the poet had attracted considerable attention for his technical acumen, dry verbal wit, and provocative use of language. "Many of Muldoon's poems are seemingly arbitrary collages of themes, phrases, times, places, characters," remarked New York Times Book Review contributor Richard Eder. "It is as if the universe were no longer there to be grasped. Some vast catastrophe has exploded it and Muldoon, from this side of the postmodern divide; sifts shards, sorts them, tries them out in pleasing patterns." Some critics considered Why Brownlee Left a more mature effort than Muldoon's earlier collections. According to Alan Hollinghurst in Encounter, "the key to the book" lies in a seemingly straightforward and elemental poem titled "October 1950." Chronicling the poet's own conception, the poem reflects Muldoon's preoccupation with the search for self and acknowl- edges, noted Hollinghurst, that life "refute[s] any philosophical attempts to organize or direct it." Feeling that Muldoon's poetry in Why Brownlee Left was composed mainly of "blueprints, sketches, [and] fragments," and that Muldoon is not "a truly satisfying poet," Anglo-Welsh Review's David Annwn nonetheless praised Muldoon for his "unnerving knack of capturing most elusive atmospheres, manipulating the inflexions of Anglo-Irish … and conveying a whole spectrum of humour."

Muldoon's 1983 collection, Quoof, takes its title from his family's name for a hot-water bottle. The imaginative poems in the volume offer varying perceptions of the world. "Gathering Mushrooms" opens the book with the narrator's drug-induced reminiscences of his childhood, his father, and the turmoil in Ireland. "The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants," the final poem and the volume's longest, is a narrative that follows the exploits of the mercenary-like figure Gallogly as he voyages through Northern Ireland. Writing in the London Review of Books, John Kerrigan asserted that the poetry in Quoof is "a bewildering display of narrative invention … written with that combination of visual clarity and verbal panache which has become the hallmark of Paul Muldoon." Muldoon, in an interview with Michael Donaghy in Chicago Review, commented on the violence in Quoof: "I don't think it's a very likeable or attractive book in its themes."

Meeting the British, Muldoon's 1987 collection, contains several poems of recollection as well as more unusual selections, such as "7, Middagh Street," which, according to Terry Eagleton in the Observer, blends fantasy and history with "dramatic energy and calculated irony … to produce a major poem." A series of imaginary monologues by such prominent artistic and literary figures as W.H. Auden, Salvador Dali, Gypsy Rose Lee, Carson McCullers, and Louis MacNeice, "7, Middagh Street" contains provocative commentary on the importance of politics in Irish art. Comparing Meeting the British with Quoof, Mark Ford in the London Review of Books found that whereas "Quoof tended to push its metaphors, trance-like, to the point of no return, its mushroom hallucinations not deviation from but a visionary heightening of reality: the poems in Meeting the British seem more self-aware…. Meeting the British adds some wonderful new tricks to Muldoon's repertoire." Deeming Meeting the British Muldoon's "most ambitious collection," Mick Imlah, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, noted that the volume proves an innovative addition "to a difficult and delightful body of poetry." Responding to several critics' attempts to compare the poet's style to that of his contemporaries, Conover proclaimed that Muldoon's "poems are too individual to characterize very effectively in terms of anyone else's work…. [His] conception of the poem is unique."

Muldoon's next collection was the ambitious Madoc: A Mystery, summarized by Geoffrey Stokes in the Village Voice as "quite funny, very difficult, highly ambitious, more than a little unsettling, and … subtitled ‘A Mystery.’ Which it surely is." Named after the title of a Robert Southey poem concerning a Welsh prince who discovers America in the twelfth century, the narrative flow of Madoc revolves around "what might have happened if the Romantic poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had indeed come (as they planned in 1794) to America and created a ‘pantisocracy’ (‘equal rule for all’) on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania," commented Lucy McDiarmid in her New York Times Book Review piece on Madoc. Coleridge becomes entranced by peyote and Native American culture while Southey becomes vengeful and tyrannical after a loss of idealism. The question, in the words of Thomas M. Disch in Poetry, is whether or not Madoc's "helter-skelter narrative pattern, with its excursions into such parallel lives as those of Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, Lewis and Clark, Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson, and George Catlin, add up either to a memorable drama or to a coherent vision of history." Despite finding Madoc "readable for its entire length," Disch's answer remained: "I don't think so." Stokes countered Disch, and commented: "The question is whether it's worth stepping into Madoc even once; the answer is an unqualified yes."

"The Annals of Chile is easier of access and more emotionally direct than Madoc, while more allusive and arcane than [Muldoon's] earlier work," argued Richard Tillinghast in the New York Times Book Review. "Incantata," one of two central poems in The Annals of Chile, remembers Muldoon's lover Mary Farl Powers in a "beautiful and heartfelt elegy" in the words of Times Literary Supplement reviewer Lawrence Norfolk. "It is Muldoon's most transparent poem for some time, and also his most musical." "Yarrow," the second, "jazzily juxtaposes swashbuckling daydreams … with real life's painful memories of a druggy girlfriend's breakdown and the death of [Muldoon's] mother," commented Michael Dirda in a Washington Post Book World review. Mark Ford, in a review of The Annals of Chile in the London Review of Books, found the themes of "less scope for the kinds of all-synthesizing wit characteristic of Muldoon." William Pratt concluded in the World Literature Today that for those readers "who enjoy having a leg pulled, Muldoon is your man; to those who expect something more substantial from poetry, Muldoon rhymes with buffoon." Los Angeles Times Book Review critic Katherine McNamara, however, found that in The Annals of Chile, "every word, every reference, every allusion, carries meaning. Muldoon never flinches in his brilliant verbal workings." In his review of The Annals of Chile for Poetry, F.D. Reeve characterized Muldoon as "a juggler, a handspringing carny, a gandy dancer, a stand-up comic, and intellectual muckraker," and went on to state: "He bends language as easily as Geller, the psychic, bent spoons."

The 1996 Kerry Slides, in which Muldoon's poems are accompanied by the photographs of Bill Doyle, received significant praise from Patricia Monaghan, writing in Booklist, who dubbed it "an inspired collaboration." The title of the book refers both to the Irish dance of that name and to Doyle's photos of Kerry County in southwestern Ireland. "Muldoon's short poems," Monaghan remarked, "are only obliquely connected to Doyle's black-and-white photos," yet at the same time she felt that their "wild rhymes and witty wordplay encapsulate history, myth, language, and landscape." Monaghan found Doyle's photos to be "dreamlike despite their sharpness," and went on to note "his eye sees beyond the picturesque to the archetypal."

Muldoon's Hay is a diverse collection, covering subjects from the personal to the political and the universal, offering a range of forms and styles that includes sonnets, sestinas, haiku, and much more. William Logan of New Criterion observed: "Poems shift and ratchet, one time slipping into another, one place substituting for another, scenes turning themselves inside out, lines jolting and stuttering, mysteriously repeating according to some Masonic code, subject to sudden outcries of ‘hey’ or ‘wheehee’ or ‘tra la.’" The dust jacket for the book describes Muldoon as a "prodigy" who has now become a "virtuoso." It is Muldoon's technical virtuosity that some reviewers of Hay fastened upon as a drawback in the work. Reviewing the book for the New Republic, Adam Kirsch noted: "If virtuosity is all that a poet can display, if his poems demand attention simply because of their elaborateness and difficulty, then he has in some sense failed…. It is true that Muldoon sometimes writes directly, with plain emotion, even sentimentality. But those are not his most characteristic poems, nor his best. When he is at his most original, Muldoon is rather a kind of acrobat, piling up strange rhymes, references, and conceits in a way that is disorienting and exhilarating." According to Logan: "Muldoon is … in love (not wisely but too well) with language itself…. Too often the result is tedious foolery, the language run amok with Jabberwocky possibility (words, words, monotonously inbreeding), as if possibility were reason enough for the doing." Yet almost as if in spite of themselves, both Logan and Kirsch also offered praise for Hay. Logan concluded: "Everyone interested in contemporary poetry should read this book…. In our time of tired mirrors and more-than-tiresome confession, Muldoon is the rare poet who writes through the looking glass." In a similar vein, Kirsch remarked: "at a time when poetry has all but forgotten the possibilities of adventurous form, when the majority of poets are trivially self-expressive and the minority with higher ambitions pursue a formless complexity, Muldoon's ability to construct his poems is rare, and admirable."

Poems 1968-1998 collects a number of Muldoon's long poems and poetry cycles, including "Yarrow" and "Madoc," as well as his early out-of-print works. "Muldoon's signature Gaelic whimsy is thoroughly refreshing," remarked Book contributor Stephen Whited, and a Publishers Weekly critic stated that the volume "serves better than Muldoon's older selecteds to reveal the full range of his prodigious talents." Not every critic offered unqualified praise, however. Though William Pratt, writing in World Literature Today, called Muldoon's verse "inventive" and "diverting," he also questioned whether the novelty of the poems undermined their authenticity. According to Pratt, Muldoon's "method is to make works behave as if they were independent of the world, as if they came and went at will, the writer's will to master them by mangling well-known phrases, dropping famous names, and fabricating non sequiturs." Eder offered a different perspective, stating: "You have not understood Muldoon … unless he perplexes you. You have been authentically touched or delighted only if perplexed, and very likely exasperated as well."

Muldoon received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his 2002 collection Moy Sand and Gravel, "a complicated network of verse declarations, stunts and depictions that may be fun for, and turn out to describe, a whole family," observed a critic in Publishers Weekly. In the collection, which includes the long closing poem "At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999," Muldoon examines fatherhood, Irish history, and his wife's Jewish-American heritage. According to Davison, Moy Sand and Gravel "shimmers with play, the play of mind, the play of recondite information over ordinary experience, the play of observation and sensuous detail, of motion upon custom, of Irish and English languages and landscapes, of meter and rhyme."

The End of the Poem gathers a series of fifteen lectures that Muldoon delivered at Oxford University, where he taught for five years. Each discussion focuses on a specific work by poets such as W.B. Yeats, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore. "Muldoon entertains almost as much as he enlightens, an unusual and refreshing approach," noted an Economist reviewer. "He dives into the etymology of words, and then relates these discoveries to far-flung biographical and historical fact. At times, his insights can be acute, at others farfetched and almost outrageously fanciful." Muldoon "takes his chosen poems apart, apprehending each one as a web of intertextual connections leading in multiple directions," Hammer Langdon commented in the New York Times Book Review. "He is continually moving away from the poem at hand to another and another after that. But getting to the point is not the point. Muldoon dramatizes his experience of reading in such a way that he revives, admittedly speculatively and by means of his own circuits of association, the process by which the poem came into being."

In Horse Latitudes, Muldoon experiments with a variety of poetic forms, including haiku, a sonnet sequence, a double villanelle, a sestina, and a pantoum, as he offers his perspectives on mortality, the death of musician Warren Zevon, and post-9/11 America. The collection "displays formal sophistication and a mercurial voice—from comically hip to elegiac, from allusive and learned to downright ornery," noted Christian Century reviewer Brett Foster, who added: "Most readers of Horse Latitudes will find a powerful if troubled heart beating beneath the verbal spells and bricolage. Muldoon has always reveled in keen intelligence and catholic interests, but now, at midcareer and midlife, he does the more daring thing—he reveals. Though dazzling technique still reigns, he now engages personal history more frequently." According to Poetry contributor Brian Philips, "when Muldoon is at his best he is one of the most exhilarating of all living poets. Even when he befuddles or frustrates us, he leaves us with a not unpleasant Farmer MacGregorish feeling that we have witnessed an astonishing feat, and had some of our vegetables go missing. And far more often he has nothing in common with that other famous escape artist; he leaves us with more than he takes."

Muldoon once told CA: "I started [writing poetry] when I was fifteen or sixteen. I'd written a few poems before then, as I suppose most people do. It seems to me that children of eight or nine—though I don't remember writing anything myself when I was that age—are in a way some of the best poets I've come across. Poems by children of that age are quite fresh, untrammeled by any ideas of what a poem might be or what a poem should look like. While I think it's perhaps a little romantic to suggest it, I believe it's something of that quality that people a little older are trying to get back to, something of that rinsed quality of the eye.

"I wrote lots of poems as a teenager, many of them heavily under the influence of T.S. Eliot, who seemed to me to be quite a marvelous person. I devoured Eliot and learned everything I could about him. He's a bad person, though, for anyone trying to write to learn from, since his voice is so much his own; I ended up doing parodies of Eliot. I read a lot of poetry, modern poetry as well as poetry by writers all the way through in English and indeed in Irish. And gradually I began to learn, particularly from writers who were round about, like Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and other Irish writers who were writing about things I knew about. I think it's quite important to have people round about who remind one that writing poetry is not an entirely weird occupation, that one isn't the only one trying to do it.

"As to choosing poetry rather than some other form of writing, in a way I chose poetry over the weekly essay. We had a teacher who used to assign an essay every week, and rather than an essay, I wrote a poem one week because it seemed to me a much easier, certainly a shorter, thing to do. In a way it was out of laziness that I felt I might try to write poems, and I continued to do it. I'd love to be able to write prose, and I've written the occasional little autobiographical piece for radio or whatever, but I find it takes me so long to write a sentence, or to write anything. I don't have a natural fluency in writing. The poems I do try to write are aimed to sound very off-the-cuff, very simple and natural, as if they were spoken, or as if they were composed in about the same time as it takes to speak them. But I spend a lot of time getting that effect; it doesn't come naturally.

"There is a school of thought that holds that the writer is dead, and really anyone can read whatever they like into this text, as they insist on calling it nowadays. I think one of the jobs of a writer is to contain and restrict the range of possible meanings and readings and con- notations that a series of words on a page can have. There's an element of the manipulative about the process of writing. The writer is very truly a medium if things are ideal. The writer should be open to the language and allowing the language to do the work. I don't want to sound like somebody who's heavily into Zen, but I really do believe in all of that; I believe in inspiration in some way.

"On the other hand, there is this other part involved in the writing, the part that is marshaling and is looking on as an acute, intense reader. When I am writing, I'm in control of this uncontrollable thing. It's a combination of out of control and in control. What I'm interested in doing, usually, is writing poems with very clear, translucent surfaces, but if you look at them again, there are other things happening under the surface. And I am interested in poems that go against their own grain, that are involved in irony, that seem to be saying one thing but in fact couldn't possibly be saying that. I am interested in what's happening in those areas, and I do try to control that and hope that I have controlled it. But sometimes when I reread a poem much later (which I don't usually do), I wonder, What on earth was I thinking of there?"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Andrews, Elmer Kennedy, editor, Paul Muldoon: Poetry, Prose, Drama, Colin Smythe (Buckinghamshire, England), 2006.

British Writers, Supplement 4, Charles Scribner's Sons (New York, NY), 1997.

Buxton, Rachel, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry, Clarendon Press (New York, NY), 2004.

Kendall, Tim, Paul Muldoon, Dufour Editions (Chester Springs, PA), 1996.

Wills, Clair, Reading Paul Muldoon, Bloodaxe Books (Northumberland, England), 1998.

PERIODICALS

American Record Guide, July 1, 1993, John von Rhein, review of Shining Brow, p. 37.

Anglo-Welsh Review, 1981, David Annwn, review of Why Brownlee Left, p. 74.

Architecture, September, 1997, Stanley Tigerman, review of Shining Brow, p. 45.

Book, November 1, 2001, Stephen Whited, review of Poems 1968-1998, p. 71.

Booklist, January 1, 1997, Patricia Monaghan, review of Kerry Slides, p. 809; March 1, 2001, Patricia Monaghan, review of Poems 1968-1998, p. 1220.

Books, October 8, 2006, "Paul Muldoon's Poems and Essays Pulse with Emotional and Intellectual Vigor," p. 6.

Books in Canada, May, 2003, review of Moy Sand and Gravel, p. 38.

Chicago Review, autumn, 1985, Michael Donaghy, interview with Paul Muldoon, p. 76.

Choice, March, 2001, S. Donovan, review of To Ireland, I: The 1998 Clarendon Lectures, p. 1272.

Christian Century, May 15, 2007, Brett Foster, review of Horse Latitudes, p. 36.

Christian Science Monitor, April 10, 2003, review of Moy Sand and Gravel, p. 21.

Contemporary Literature, spring, 1994, Lynn Keller, "An Interview with Paul Muldoon."

Economist, June 23, 2001, review of Poems 1968-1998, p. 121; February 8, 2003, review of Moy Sand and Gravel, p. 76; October 21, 2006, "Look Deep into My Eyes; Understanding Poetry," p. 96.

Eire-Ireland, summer, 1975, Roger Conover, review of New Weather p. 127.

Encounter, February-March, 1981, Alan Hollinghurst, review of Why Brownlee Left; March, 1984, review of Quoof, p. 49; March, 1987, review of Selected Poems: 1968-86, p. 57.

Georgia Review, winter, 1995, review of The Prince of the Quotidian.

Hollins Critic, February, 1996, Harriet Zinnes, "Paul Muldoon: ‘Time-switched Taped to the Trough,’" p. 1.

Kenyon Review, summer, 1988, review of Selected Poems, p. 127.

Library Journal, August, 2002, Rochelle Ratner, review of Moy Sand and Gravel, p. 101; September 1, 2006, Karla Huston, review of Horse Latitudes, p. 151; September 15, 2006, Paolina Taglienti, review of The End of the Poem, p. 61.

Listener, October 13, 1977, review of Mules, p. 486.

London Review of Books, February 16, 1984, John Kerrigan, review of Quoof, p. 22; December 10, 1987, Mark Ford, review of Meeting the British, p. 20; January 12, 1995, Mark Ford, review of The Annals of Chile, p. 19.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 11, 1994, Katherine McNamara, review of The Annals of Chile, p. 13.

Magpies, March, 1996, review of The Last Thesaurus, p. 45.

National Post, December 16, 2006, "Poet Brings Playfulness, Humour and Intellect."

New Criterion, December, 1998, William Logan, "Sins & Sensibility," p. 69.

New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, winter, 1989, review of Meeting the British, p. 179.

New Republic, November 30, 1998, Adam Kirsch, review of Hay, p. 56.

New Statesman, September 26, 1980, "Why Brownlee Left," p. 21; January 16, 1987, John Lucas, review of Selected Poems, p. 30.

New Yorker, May 17, 1993, Paul Griffiths, review of Shining Brow, p. 98.

New York Review of Books, February 26, 1987, Denis Donoghue, review of The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, p. 25; May 30, 1991, review of Madoc: A Mystery, p. 37; November 6, 1997, Helen Hennessey Vendler, review of Selected Poems, p. 57; September 25, 2003, "At Arm's Length," p. 68; December 21, 2006, "The Call of the Stallion," p. 78.

New York Times, November 19, 2002, "Times Are Difficult, So Why Should the Poetry Be So Easy? Paul Muldoon Continues to Create by Lashing Outlandish Ideas Together," p. 1; April 9, 2003, Dinitia Smith, "Uncompromising in Poetry since a First Example at 16," p. 5.

New York Times Book Review, July 28, 1991, Lucy McDiarmid, review of Madoc, p. 14; December 11, 1994, Richard Tillinghast, review of The Annals of Chile, p. 25; June 10, 2001, Richard Eder, "To Understand Is to Be Perplexed," p. 14; October 13, 2002, Peter Davison, "Darkness at Muldoon," p. 22; February 18, 2007, Langdon Hammer, "Gamesmanship," reviews of Horse Latitudes and The End of the Poem, p. 24.

Observer (London, England), May 3, 1987, Terry Eagleton, review of Meeting the British, p. 25.

Parnassus: Poetry in Review, August, 1990, Calvin Bedient, review of Selected Poems, p. 195.

Partisan Review, summer, 1988, Sven Birkerts, review of Selected Poems.

Poetry, May, 1992, Thomas M. Disch, review of Madoc, p. 94; November, 1994, review of Selected Poems, p. 101; April, 1997, F.D. Reeve, review of The Annals of Chile, p. 37; December, 2006, Brian Phillips, "Eight Takes," p. 232.

Publishers Weekly, February 12, 2001, review of Poems 1968-1998, p. 204; June 17, 2002, review of Moy Sand and Gravel, p. 57; July 31, 2006, review of Horse Latitudes, p. 53; August 21, 2006, review of The End of the Poem, p. 63.

School Librarian, September, 1980, review of The Scrake of Dawn: Poems by Young People from Northern Ireland, p. 321; February, 1996, review of The Last Thesaurus, p. 28; November, 1997, review of The Noctuary of Narcissus Batt, p. 209; summer, 1998, review of The Faber Book of Beasts.

Sewanee Review, summer, 1987, Ben Howard, review of The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry.

Spectator, November 27, 1993, review of Shining Brow, p. 35.

Times Educational Supplement, October 3, 1997, Jo Shapcott, review of The Faber Book of Beasts, p. 8; November 7, 1997, review of The Noctuary of Narcissus Batt, p. 2.

Times Higher Education Supplement, November 17, 1995, "Poetry in Motion," p. 18.

Times Literary Supplement, April 20, 1973, review of New Weather, p. 442; July 1, 1977, Peter Scupham, review of Mules, p. 801; March 28, 1980, review of The Scrake of Dawn, p. 373; November 14, 1980, review of Why Brownlee Left, p. 1287; May 30, 1986, review of The Wishbone, p. 585; September 4, 1987, Mick Imlah, review of Meeting the British, p. 946; October 12, 1990, review of Madoc, p. 1105; May 14, 1993, Patrick Smith, review of Shining Brow, p. 21; October 7, 1994, Lawrence Norfolk, review of The Prince of the Quotidian, p. 32; November 21, 1997, Eric Korn, review of The Faber Book of Beasts, p. 16; June 2, 2000, Clair Wills, review of To Ireland, I, p. 6; June 29, 2001, Bernard O'Donoghue, review of Vera of Las Vegas, p. 7; November 24, 2006, "Connection Charge," p. 6.

Village Voice, July 30, 1991, Geoffrey Stokes, review of Madoc, p. 68.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 2007, Lilah Hegnauer, review of Horse Latitudes.

Washington Post Book World, January 31, 1988, review of Meeting the British, p. 5; January 1, 1995, Michael Dirda, review of The Annals of Chile, p. 8.

World Literature Today, spring, 1995, William Pratt, review of The Annals of Chile, p. 365; June 22, 2001, William Pratt, review of Poems 1968-1998, p. 154.