Moy Sand and Gravel

Description

Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems finds him working a rich vein that extends from his childhood County Armagh of the 1950s to present day New Jersey where he now lives. As gritty as they are graceful, the poems are underscored by an elegiac tone - particularly in the elegant remaking of Yeats's 'A Prayer for My Daughter' with which the book concludes.

Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He read Engli sh at Queen s University, Belfast, and published his first collection of poems, New Weather, in 1973. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998) and Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is the Howard G. B. Clark Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. In 1999 he became the Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in 1996. Other recent awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin Prize, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Awar

"A marvellous book; nothing human, or inhuman, is alien to it."--Andrew Motion, "The Independent "Books of the Year "Among the few significant poets of our half-century." --Tim Kendall, "The Guardian" "Paul Muldoon is a shape-shifting Proteus to readers who try to pin him down...Those who interrogate Muldoon's poems find themselves changing shapes each time he does... authentically touched or delighted." --Richard Eder, "The New York Times Book Review" "One of the English-Speaking world's most acclaimed poets still at the top of his slippery, virtuosic game." --"Publishers Weekly"