| Edition |
1st ed. |
| Description |
ix, 107 pages ; 22 cm |
| Contents |
Hard drive -- Unapproved road -- Moy sand and gravel -- The misfits -- The braggart -- The whinny -- A collegelands catechism -- Beagles -- Tell -- Guns and butter -- One last draw of the pipe -- Caedmon's hymn -- Paul Valéry: Pomegranates -- Pineapples and pomegranates -- Winter wheat -- Herm -- Whitethorns -- Affairs of state -- The otter -- John Luke: The fox -- Anthony Green: the second marriage -- As -- The stoic -- Famous first words -- The grand conversation -- On -- An old pit pony -- Summer coal -- The loaf -- The outhouse -- News headlines from the Homer Noble farm -- The killdeer -- Horace: Two odes -- Eugenio Montale: The eel -- When Aifric and I put in at that little creek -- The ancestor -- Homesickness -- Two stabs at Oscar -- The breather -- The goose -- A brief discourse on decommissioning -- The turn -- Redknots -- Cradle song for Asher -- At the sign of the black horse, September 1999. |
| Summary |
Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening, as gritty as they are graceful, these poems seem capable of taking in almost anything, and anybody, be it a Tuareg glimpsed on the Irish border, Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth I, a hunted hare, William Tell, William Butler Yeats, Sitting Bull, Ted Hughes, an otter, a fox, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Joscelyne, un unearthed pit pony, a loaf of bread, an outhouse, a killdeer, Oscar Wilde, or a flock of redknots. At the heart of the book is an elegy for a miscarried child, and that elegiac tone predominates, particularly in the elegant remaking of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" with which the book concludes, where a welter of traffic signs and slogans, along with the spirits of admen, hardware storekeepers, flimflammers, fixers, and other forebears, are borne along by a hurricane-swollen canal, and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matter of our age. |
| Awards |
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 2003. |
| Subject |
English poetry.
|
|
Poetry.
|
|
English poetry. (OCoLC)fst00912278
|
|
C0 GWV |
| ISBN |
0374214808 (hc : alk. paper) |
|
9780374214807 (hc : alk. paper) |
|
0374528845 |
|
9780374528843 |
|
