The Word on the Street

Description

In this new collection Paul Muldoon goes back to the essential meaning of the term 'lyric' -a short poem sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument. These words are written for music, assuredly, with half an ear to Yeats's ballad-singing porter drinkers and half to Cole Porter-and indeed, many of them double as rock songs, performed by the Wayside Shrines, the Princeton-based music collective of which Muldoon is a member. Their themes are the classic themes of song: lost love, lost wars, Charlton Heston, barbed wire, pole dancers, cellulite, Hegel, elephants, Oedipus, more barbed wire, Buddy Holly, Jersey peaches, Julius Caesar, Trenton, cockatoos, and the Youngers (Bob and John and Jim and Cole). The Word on the Street is a lively addition to this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's masterful body of work. It demonstrates, once again, that, as Richard Eder has written in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, '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.'

Acclaimed for his many poetry collections, from New Weather (1973) to Maggot (2010), and winner of numerous awards including the Pulitzer and T.S. Eliot Prizes, Paul Muldoon is Howard G.B. Clark Professor and Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University. He also writes lyrics for the music collective, Wayside Shrines.