Joy in Service on Rue Tagore

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE

'To describe Paul Muldoon's influence on contemporary poetry is like trying to assess the influence of The Beatles on post-war music: it's to be seen and heard in the work of almost every British and Irish poet since the 1970's.' Irish Post

Since his debut, New Weather (1973), Paul Muldoon has created some of the most original and memorable poetry of the past half-century. Joy in Service on Rue Tagore sees him writing with the same verve and distinction that have consistently won him the the highest accolades.

Here, from artichokes to zinc, he navigates an alphabet of image and history, through barleymen and Irish slavers to the last running wolf in Ulster. The search involves the accumulated bric-a-brac of a life, and a reckoning along the way of gains against loss. In the poet's skilful hands, ancient maps are unfurled and brought into focus - the aggregation of Imperial Rome and the dismantling of Standard Oil, the pogroms of a Ukrainian ravine and of a Belfast shipyard. Through modern medicine and warfare, disaster and repair, these poems are electric in their energy, while profoundly humane in their line of enquiry.

'Truly, is there any living poet with as skilled and rambunctious an ear as Paul Muldoon? . . . One of the pleasures of Muldoon's poems is the way they make reality seem to go right to the verge of surrealism, the very shaky lip of it.' Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's

Paul Muldoon is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Among his other awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 2003 Griffin Prize, the 2015 Pigott Prize, and the 2017 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Born in County Armagh in 1951, he has lived since 1987 in the United States, where he is the Howard G. B. Clark Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. In 2022 he was appointed Ireland Professor of Poetry.

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