To Ireland, I

Description

A reissue of Paul Muldoon's brilliant debut as a critic and literary historian, in his Oxford Clarendon lectures of 1998. The four lectures together take the form of an A-Z, or abecedary of Irish literature.

Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He read English at Queen's University, Belfast, and published his first collection of poems, New Weather, in 1973. He is the author of ten 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), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Horse Latitudes (2006). Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is the Howard G. B. Clark Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. From 1999 to 2004 he was 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, and the 2003 Griffin Prize.

"A more far-fetched, eye-opening, and stimulating survey of Irish literature would be difficult to imagine. Informal and esoteric, scholarly and playful, the book is both an idiosyncratic encyclopedia and a secret history of unsuspected imaginative tendencies and possibilities....An instructive and thoroughly enjoyable work of imagination."--The Irish Herald"[To Ireland, I] is practically continuous with [Muldoon's] poems, and I wouldn't be surprised if in the long run it proves to be nearly as profound and inexhaustibly bountiful as they... Muldoon's stylishness, playfulness, and sheer erudition are impressive.... To Ireland, I stands as both testament and monument to that most fundamental of artistic rights, the right to freedom of association (association of ideas, that is). Muldoon's books, like Joyce's, are not to be devoured or comprehended all at once; rather, they are to remain always there, a part of the landscape to which we readers--if we are wise and fortunate reade